Wednesday, 23 May 2018

WEDNESDAY, 23 MAY 2018

WEDNESDAY, 23 MAY 2018

The Speaker took the Chair at 2 p.m.

Prayers.

Oral Questions

Questions to Ministers

Prime Minister—Winter Energy Payment and Fees-free Policy

1. Hon PAULA BENNETT (Deputy Leader—National) to the Prime Minister: Does she stand by all of her Government’s policies and actions?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN (Prime Minister): Yes.

Hon Paula Bennett: Can she confirm that as a result of her delay to the implementation of the winter energy payment, superannuitants will be around $300 worse off this year than they would have been following National’s proposed tax cuts?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Of course, the member will be aware we very deliberately cancelled those tax cuts so that we could invest in the low and middle income New Zealanders who needed that investment more than the top 10 percent of income earners, who would get $400 million worth. We have, however, identified that superannuitants experience things like winter poverty. We would have very much liked our payment to have come in earlier. It starts on 1 July and then it runs through till September. When it’s fully implemented, those superannuitants can expect to receive $700 as a couple—$450—but, again, this year it is less than that, unfortunately.

Hon Paula Bennett: How can she justify waiting till 1 July for the winter energy payment because, as she said previously, it was difficult to implement earlier, and yet she could bring in a fees-free policy on 1 January worth $2.8 billion?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: As the member would well know, having been the Minister for Social Development, making the largest changes to the welfare system in over a decade can be a complex exercise. We deliberately created a mini-Budget in December in order to expedite bringing in the winter energy payment, the Best Start payment, and Working for Families changes, and managed to do it in a time that I think even that side of the House would have found challenging, given their tax cut changes didn’t come in till the following year.

Hon Paula Bennett: Is the Prime Minister really leading us to believe that it would have been harder to universally give a one-off payment to all superannuitants on 1 May than it is to actually do the difficulties of different courses, 294,000 students, on 1 January for mixed payments?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Yes.

Hon Paula Bennett: Does she agree with education Minister Chris Hipkins that the fees-free policy will drive a 15 percent increase in student numbers?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Taking into account that we have to reverse a trend under that last Government of declining enrolment in post-secondary education, which we are trying to reverse. Of course, the members on the other side of the House have taken an unfortunate and narrow view of the need for us to have a greater proportion of our population in post-secondary education that includes those who have never studied before, who might be factory floor workers or, indeed, McDonald’s workers, to go to wānanga or polytech to retrain, boost our productivity, and transform our economy.

Hon Paula Bennett: Let me rephrase: does she agree with the education Minister that the fees-free policy will drive a 15 percent increase in student numbers, particularly as she just said and accused us of not—

SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! [Interruption] Order! The member finished her question some time ago.

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: The point that I was making is that we had declining enrolment numbers. In fact, we did point out that, actually, for the last year our expectations were lower than that. We know that we have to make up ground, because, as I’ve said, there was a tendency for post-secondary education to start declining, and we’re trying to reverse that trend. I would have thought the other side of the House would be a bit more ambitious about the options for New Zealanders to retrain and educate themselves.

Hon Paula Bennett: Is she concerned about the effectiveness of her flagship $2.8 billion fees-free tertiary policy given Treasury is now forecasting that there will not be a 15 percent increase, not a 5 percent—

SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! The member’s finished. She’s had two legs already.

Hon Paula Bennett: No I haven’t. Not even no increase but, instead, 900 fewer students. Actually, that is the relevant point, Mr Speaker.

SPEAKER: Order! The member will resume her seat.

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Again, the two points I’d like to make—

Hon Gerry Brownlee: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: —is that this side of—

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Point of order.

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Gerry, I’ve got this. [Interruption]

SPEAKER: Order! Order!

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Well, that was clearly an interruption of a point of order, so, clearly, you’ll want to rule on that.

SPEAKER: No, I hadn’t yet called the member.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Well, you had, actually. The Hansard will show you had.

SPEAKER: Well, if that is correct, I apologise to the member. The member now has the call. Would he like to make his point of order?

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Yes. Your suggestion that the question is now over seems to me to fly in the face of there needing to be some verification for questions. If you want us to start writing novels before the actual question ends, we can do that, but some flexibility in being able to make a point with the question is not unreasonable given that everyone knows question time is a time when the Government defends itself and has a much greater opportunity to do that. That should be couched in terms of the information given or provided by the question, and that’s the point of verification.

SPEAKER: Well, I thank the member for his advice. I will listen carefully in the future. It would probably be easier to judge and less complicated if there weren’t addendums before the question started as well as unnecessary information for the purpose of the question during it.

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: The point I was making was actually that the member is reinforcing the issue that we had. We had a declining number of people engaging in post-secondary education, regardless of whether they were school leavers or those already on the factory floor. The OECD said we needed to do something about it; the IMF said we needed to do something about it—this Government is. It may take time, but it will be worth it.

Hon Paula Bennett: In November, when her education Minister made his statement that it would increase by 15 percent, did he know it was declining, or is she just using that as an excuse now to break her promise?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: We all knew it was declining, we all knew we had to do something about it, and we all know that we’ve got a productivity challenge in New Zealand. This side of the House is willing to take that challenge on; that side would rather see barriers to education continue.

Hon Paula Bennett: So why was a $2.8 billion bribe for tertiary students more important than her promises around health, education, and police that she’s promised?

SPEAKER: No, no, no. I’m going to require the deputy leader of the National Party to rephrase that question in a way that she knows is within Standing Orders, and she’s not getting an extra question for doing it; this will be a new supplementary.

Hon Paula Bennett: Why was a $2.8 billion payment for tertiary students more important than her promises around health, education, and police?

Rt Hon JACINDA ARDERN: Again, a narrow view of the policy given this will have a greater potential impact for those workers who have never ever engaged in post-secondary education. But my second question: if it’s a bribe, will you reverse it?

Hon Paula Bennett: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. You ruled out a word that I wasn’t to use, and yet then the Prime Minister is free to use it in her answer.

SPEAKER: I think the Prime Minister could well have been reflecting the inappropriate comment of the member. [Interruption] Order! Order! If members can’t see a description of someone’s own policy as being different from a description of another person’s policy—picking up the words inappropriately used I think is not out of order. What I thought the member was going to object to was the Prime Minister’s reference to the second person, and I want to remind her that she should keep me out of the debate and out of the questions.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Well, all things considered, then, do we get that question back?

SPEAKER: No.

Hon Paula Bennett: Why was $900 million—[Interruption]

SPEAKER: Order! Order! The Opposition just lost five questions. Gerry Brownlee will stand, withdraw, and apologise.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: I withdraw and apologise. I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Mr Speaker, your job is to keep order in this House, not to prevent the Opposition from challenging the Government on their programmes. Your repeated recall of questions from us does that, and I think that is most inappropriate and bad for our democracy.

SPEAKER: I want to thank the member for his advice, but I will not have senior members referring to me in the way that he did by way of interjection. I do regard what he has just done as grossly disorderly, and I will contemplate what will happen. I think members know that, in the past, anyone who made that comment would’ve been tossed out of the House, and I don’t want it to be my practice to do that—especially to a senior member of the House—but the member should know better, and I will contemplate what I will do as question time goes on.

Hon Paula Bennett: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I think the point I do want to pick up is that I think the use of taking away and gaining supplementary questions does question our ability as the Opposition to actually put the Government on notice, to actually ask the questions that we have a right to do as part of our democracy. My colleague may not have made that point as clearly as he wanted to, but that’s certainly how this side of the House feels.

SPEAKER: Well, I now regard that member as being grossly disorderly. She has again relitigated the point that I’ve been ruling on. The member knows well that supplementary questions are at my discretion. Any supplementary questions are at my discretion. I’ve chosen to use this approach. As a result of it, to date, the National Party have had 22 more supplementaries than they would’ve had according to the numbers given by the Clerk. They have done very well out of the process, mainly as a result of disorderly behaviour by Mr Jones and a couple of his colleagues. But the National Party is ahead on it, and I absolutely reject any suggestion that the National Party have not been able to ask the number of questions over this Parliament that they would’ve been able to otherwise. That’s just not true.

Hon Paula Bennett: Speaking to the point of order.

SPEAKER: No, there’s no point of order. If the member wants a further supplementary, she can take it. If not, we’ll move on.

Hon Paula Bennett: No, I’m leaving. What a waste of time.

SPEAKER: For how long?

Hon Paula Bennett: Oh, just for today.

SPEAKER: Thank you.

Budget 2018—Tax Increases

2. Hon AMY ADAMS (National—Selwyn) to the Minister of Finance: Does he stand by all his statements and actions?

Hon DAVID PARKER (Associate Minister of Finance) on behalf of the Minister of Finance: Yes, in the context in which they were given and undertaken.

Hon Amy Adams: If he stands by his statement that each of the decisions he made as part of Budget 2018 will improve the well-being of New Zealanders, does he think that an Auckland family paying $700 a year more to fill up their car because of his Government’s new taxes when the price of petrol is already rising helps to take the pressure off the squeezed middle?

Hon DAVID PARKER: Whilst I don’t necessarily accept the arithmetic, I would make the point that that family is likely to be receiving significant help through the Families Package, the Best Start package, the spending on transport infrastructure, and many other initiatives in the Budget.

Hon Amy Adams: At what price per litre might he ask transport Minister, Phil Twyford, to reconsider implementing fuel excise tax increases and regional fuel taxes, as petrol is now heading towards $3 a litre?

SPEAKER: I’m just going to halt the member while I contemplate the ministerial responsibility for it. No, I will let the question go. But it is right at the edge—and possibly over—the Minister of Finance’s responsibility.

Hon DAVID PARKER: That’s speculative. It’s a matter for the responsibility of the Minister of Transport, and I’m sure he’d be happy to answer that question, but I would also make the point that if petrol prices become more expensive because of the cost of imported petrol, it’s all the more important that we have an efficient transport system in Auckland.

Hon Amy Adams: Is it in the best interests of New Zealand and New Zealanders for a full-time worker on the average wage to be hit by the highest marginal tax rate, as they are forecast to do in just a few years?

Hon DAVID PARKER: Again, that’s a hypothetical question. We have a number of Budgets coming. We’ve got a tax review coming. The member will have to wait and see how that unfolds, but, unlike the member just last week, we’ve never promised a thousand dollars a week for every working New Zealander. Early estimates put that at a cost of $136 billion, doubling Government expenditure and breaking the bank.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I have noticed that Amy Adams has a penchant for asking questions and then intervening five or six times—[Interruption]—just like now. In the last answer given by my colleague she intervened six times, and that’s simply not acceptable. If she wants an answer, then have the decency to keep quiet and hear it.

SPEAKER: I’ve got a lot of hope for politeness in the House, I want to tell the right honourable gentleman—not quite that much.

Hon Amy Adams: How much extra tax will New Zealanders have to pay before he considers the Government has enough to meet all of its promises? Is it the $20 billion a year more that’s already forecast or even more than that?

Hon DAVID PARKER: Even excluding the Christchurch earthquake expenditure by the last Government, this Government’s projected expenditure as a percentage of GDP is lower than it was under her Government.

Hon Amy Adams: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. The question was very much around the Government’s tax revenue; how much tax comes in. Government expenditure is an entirely different category. He didn’t come near to talking about the projections—

SPEAKER: I’ll let the member ask the question again.

Hon Amy Adams: How much extra tax will New Zealand have to pay before he considers the Government has enough to meet all of its promises; the $20 billion a year more that is already forecast to be paid or is it even more than that?

Hon DAVID PARKER: The Budget forecasts are in the Budget for everyone to read. I would make the point that the taxes collected by the last Government increased by $20 billion—under her Government—which is the same number she complains is forecast for this one.

Hon Amy Adams: When he said in question time yesterday, “Well, the previous Government also had some residual cash deficits in their forecasts.”, was he aware that the previous Government’s forecasts showed 13 residual cash surpluses and just one deficit over the next 14 years, while this Government’s showed 13 deficits and just one surplus?

Hon DAVID PARKER: I reject that. We’re forecasting surpluses throughout the forecast period, which matches the nine surpluses in a row we ran when last in Government. It wasn’t us that increased Government debt by $49 billion in the last year; it was the last Government.

Trade Agreements—Negotiations with European Union

3. Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central) to the Minister for Trade and Export Growth: What announcements has the Government made regarding trade and export growth?

Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for Trade and Export Growth): Last night, the European Union and the New Zealand Government announced we’ve agreed a start to free-trade agreement negotiations. The European Union is already our third-largest trading partner with two-way trade worth more than $20 billion. A free-trade agreement should increase trade even further, offering significant economic gains for New Zealand and the European Union. It’s critical to our interests that New Zealand works together with like-minded countries to combat the rising tide of protectionism around the world, and that’s what this coalition Government is doing.

Dr Duncan Webb: What has this coalition Government done to get negotiations with the EU started?

Hon DAVID PARKER: At the same time as this coalition Government has been rebuilding public support and confidence in trade at home, we’ve been getting on with trying to see the launch of negotiations. In that regard, much of the credit belongs to the Prime Minister, who on her recent visit with President Macron and Chancellor Merkel reiterated the values this Government shares with the EU. I have no doubt that her advocacy for New Zealand, particularly with France, helped get their support for the launch of negotiations.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Promote that man!

Hon DAVID PARKER: I would think that even the Hon Gerry Brownlee will thank the Prime Minister for her exemplary leadership.

Dr Duncan Webb: How will a potential EU - New Zealand free-trade agreement benefit the New Zealand environment, economy, and workers?

Hon DAVID PARKER: The exact shape of the free-trade agreement with the European Union will be determined over the coming negotiating rounds, but we expect a high-quality agreement that gives greater market access for New Zealand’s exports in both goods and services; high standards on labour, the environment, and climate change; and the EU forecast itself that the agreement could add more than $2 billion a year to the New Zealand economy, which they predict, and I agree, will flow through to increases in wages and jobs for New Zealand workers. The launch of these negotiations is yet another example of this Government building the foundations for a sustainable, high-wage, high-value economy and a fairer society.

Hon Todd McClay: Did he ask the Prime Minister whether she sought a commitment from the French President to significantly improve New Zealand’s dairy and meat exports to level the playing field with other countries we compete against in the EU market?

Hon DAVID PARKER: That is the point of the negotiation, and the Prime Minister at the time, in response to media questions, recognised that that point of tension will be one of the very issues that our negotiators will be working hard on.

Hon Todd McClay: Can the Minister confirm that he will not protest this trade agreement, or will he need to add the words “comprehensive and progressive” to its name to support it?

Hon DAVID PARKER: I can confirm that there will be no need for any such protest because this will be a much better-quality deal than that that was served up in respect of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

KiwiBuild—Eligibility and Costs

4. Hon JUDITH COLLINS (National—Papakura) to the Minister of Housing and Urban Development: Are there income limits that prospective KiwiBuild buyers will need to meet; if so, what are they?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD (Minister of Housing and Urban Development): Criteria for prospective buyers in the KiwiBuild scheme are still being developed. However, KiwiBuild homes are modest starter homes for first-home owner-occupiers. Cabinet is yet to decide whether there will be any income requirements, and, if so, what they may be.

Hon Judith Collins: Since he has previously told the media that there are no limits, would that mean that a returning New Zealand - born couple who have spent their working lives offshore and have, say, a $300,000 deposit could be eligible for a KiwiBuild house, even though they’ve never worked or paid taxes in New Zealand?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: I was correct in saying that there are no income limits, because the decision has not been made yet. There are no income limits, but on this side of the House, we know how hard it is, even for young Kiwis who have good jobs, to buy their first home. A generation of young New Zealanders with good jobs like—

SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! The Minister has answered the question.

Hon Judith Collins: Thank you, Mr Speaker. Would it be fair if a New Zealand - born couple who had worked all their working lives in New Zealand cannot fund the deposit for a KiwiBuild home, yet their taxes are being used to subsidise those who are wealthy enough to buy one?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: We’ve always seen KiwiBuild as an aspirational, affordable homeownership policy. That member should realise that people with jobs like teachers, journalists, and builders who are doing well and earning good money—

SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! I am going to interrupt the Minister and ask him—I don’t think he’s actually addressed the question asked yet. He will start by doing that.

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: KiwiBuild homes are not subsidised. With KiwiBuild, we are choosing to build houses in the lower quartile; we’re choosing to build the affordable homes that the private market is currently not building. There is no subsidy.

Marja Lubeck: How will the Government assist first-home buyers to be eligible for, and buy, KiwiBuild homes?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: We have an ambitious plan to ensure that young Kiwi families can own their own homes. We’ve begun to tackle student loans with our first years’ free tertiary education. We’re increasing the supply of houses to stem the rises in rents and house prices. We’re building a more productive and high-wage economy. Our Families Package will put more money in the pockets of families, and we’re backing higher wages through fairer employment laws—the list just goes on and on.

Hon Judith Collins: Will KiwiBuild homeowners be allowed to rent out rooms for profit in their KiwiBuild home?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: As I said, the rules around eligibility and income testing, they are yet to be made, but there’s only a few more sleeps before we can give the answer to that question.

Hon Judith Collins: Is he aware that Auckland Council is considering adding $50,000 to the development cost for each new housing section, and will this extra $50,000 per section mean that KiwiBuild buyers will need extra income in order to fund their purchase?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: I am aware that Auckland Council are considering taking that action, and I consider it a legacy of nine years of the former Government failing to do anything to reform infrastructure financing. The lack of finance for new infrastructure for development is the main roadblock to our cities growing. It is the main cause of expensive housing in Auckland. That Government failed to do anything about it for nine years.

Hon Judith Collins: Does he agree with his Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment officials that first-home KiwiBuild buyers will need an income of $114,000 a year, or does he still maintain that he was right when he said $60,000 a year will do it?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: I would note—let me see the source. I would note that some half of first-home buyers and renters who are earning more than $170,000 can buy their homes in the Auckland housing market. There is a wide range of people who are going to be able to buy KiwiBuild houses. I’m surprised that that member is suggesting there should be income limits.

Transport Infrastructure—Fuel Tax Increase Proposals and Fuel Price

5. JAMI-LEE ROSS (National—Botany) to the Minister of Transport: Is the price of fuel a factor that he will be taking into consideration when he makes future decisions on fuel taxes; if so, will he drop his proposals for increased fuel taxes if the price of fuel reaches $3 per litre?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD (Minister of Transport): International oil price fluctuations have a far greater influence on petrol prices than the policy of the previous Government and this one of regular small increases in the petrol excise. When setting petrol taxes, we must balance affordability and the infrastructure that New Zealand needs. Petrol taxes are what enable us to invest in regional roads, safety improvements, transport, and rail.

SPEAKER: Order! Now the member will stand and answer the second part of the question.

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: It’s a hypothetical, Mr Speaker.

Jami-Lee Ross: Will he drop his proposals to increase fuel taxes if the price of petrol reaches $3 a litre?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: That is a hypothetical.

Jami-Lee Ross: Has he seen reports that the price of fuel could reach $3 a litre, or are those commentators just like the “kids at Treasury”—disconnected from reality?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: I have seen reports that between January and June 2015, petrol prices increased by 40c a litre. The then Minister Simon Bridges went ahead with an excise increase in July.

SPEAKER: Order! Order!

Jami-Lee Ross: Does he remain committed to higher fuel prices, as he is proposing with his fuel tax increases?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: I’m not committed to higher fuel prices, but I am committed to making the investments that this country needs to deliver a 21st century transport system and invest in the growth in our country’s biggest city, which is currently crippled by nine years of under-investment and neglect.

Jami-Lee Ross: If he’s not committed to increasing fuel prices through increased taxation, will he drop his proposals for increased fuel taxes in the face of record high fuel prices that we’re now looking at?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: Our Government is committed to making the investments that our country needs in a 21st century transport system. When that party was in Government, they increased the fuel excise six times in nine years, by 17c a litre, at a time when petrol prices were going through the roof.

Dr Deborah Russell: What alternatives are there to excise increases?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: The reality is pretty simple. If we’re going to have less revenue to pay for transport projects, we would have to run more debt, cancel more projects, or both. The Opposition is asking us simultaneously to have less revenue, run less debt, and spend more. The maths just don’t add up, and all those demands came from the same party. That member, Jami-Lee Ross, needs to come clean and tell New Zealanders what projects he would cut.

Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern: Has the Minister seen reports that between January and June 2015, petrol prices increased by 40c a litre, but then Minister Simon Bridges went ahead with an excise increase in July?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: I have seen reports that showed that petrol went up by 40c a litre during that period—

SPEAKER: Order! Order! Thank you.

Budget 2018—Public Housing

6. PAUL EAGLE (Labour—Rongotai) to the Minister of Housing and Urban Development: How will Budget 2018 start the rebuilding of public housing in New Zealand?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD (Minister of Housing and Urban Development): Through Budget 2018, the Government will add a net additional 6,400 public homes—that is, homes provided by Housing New Zealand and community housing providers—for families in need, and will also expand the Housing First programme. As at 31 March this year, there were 66,582 public housing places. In four years’ time, that number will increase to over 73,000 homes. Budget 2018 is the first step in rebuilding public housing.

Paul Eagle: How does this increase compare to recent years?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: The number of public houses decreased by 1,500 and the number of State houses decreased by 6,000 over the last decade. It’s going to take a long time to catch up on a decade of neglect, but Budget 2018 is the first step in ensuring that every Kiwi family has a warm, dry, and secure roof over their heads.

Paul Eagle: Where will these public houses be built?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: Well, we need to build more public houses in every community—yes, even in Epsom. Around 3,500 houses will be in Auckland, with the balance being in parts of New Zealand where the need is greatest, such as Hastings, which recently saw an increase in the housing wait-list of 86 percent. These families will enhance the communities that they move into, and I’m proud of this Government’s commitment to rebuilding public housing.

Budget 2018—School Donations

7. Hon NIKKI KAYE (National—Auckland Central) to the Minister of Education: Does he stand by all his promises in education; if so, does he stand by his statement in February 2018 regarding ending school donations, “As it is Budget sensitive I can’t comment further at this point”?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): Yes, and yes.

Hon Nikki Kaye: Why did he say, in January, to the Nelson Mail that a school donations proposal was working its way through Cabinet and “This restricts me from making any comment further at this stage.”, and when did that schools donations Cabinet paper go through?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Because it was working its way through the process. It was called the Budget process.

Hon Nikki Kaye: Will he reimburse schools and parents who are contacting electorate offices saying they relied on his broken promise to end school donations in the first Budget, and how will they find funding from somewhere else?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: The Government has been very clear that we have three Budgets in which to deliver the commitments we made in the Speech from the Throne. We have, thus far, delivered one of the three Budgets.

Hon Nikki Kaye: Will he promise that funding will be provided in Budget 2019 to end school donations?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: All of the commitments in the Speech from the Throne are subject to further Budget consideration if they weren’t funded in this year’s Budget. There are two further Budgets that the Government will be delivering over this term of Government.

Hon Nikki Kaye: How does he justify breaking his explicit promise to parents to scrap the school donations in his first Budget when his Government is budgeting a surplus of $3.1 billion, the tax take is up by $1 billion, and the Government can afford to give millions to wealthy students, Swedish diplomats—

SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order!

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: To be clear, the Government was never going to be able to deliver all of the commitments we made in our first Budget, and we’ve always been very clear that we weren’t going to be able to deliver those things in our first Budget. That’s why we have a three-year term, and three Budgets in which to deliver on them.

Families Package—Measures

8. ANAHILA KANONGATA’A-SUISUIKI (Labour) to the Minister for Social Development: What changes can New Zealanders expect on 1 July as part of the Families Package?

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI (Minister for Social Development): Significant changes will occur beginning 1 July. We are boosting the incomes of low to middle income families by increasing the family tax credit and raising the abatement threshold, reinstating the independent earner tax credit, and introducing the new Best Start and winter energy payments. We prioritised work in these areas as part of our 100-day plan because far too many New Zealanders were in need of support. This Government is committed to action.

Anahila Kanongata’a-Suisuiki: Why is this important? [Interruption]

SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! This will be a short reply.

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI: We know that over the last 10 years, people have been increasingly doing it tough. Our Families Package measures address the needs of low to middle income New Zealanders, working New Zealanders, those out of work, children, and our superannuitants. We aren’t placing our hopes on the trickle-down theory, because, clearly, it hasn’t worked.

Anahila Kanongata’a-Suisuiki: Why should all superannuitants be eligible for the winter energy payment?

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI: We’re seeing growing poverty amongst our senior citizens. Fewer are going into retirement owning their own homes, and more are presenting at Work and Income offices across the country with hardship needs. In 2016-17, almost 10,000 seniors suffered from pneumonia, and that doesn’t take into account other respiratory conditions. I’ve been told on numerous occasions of senior citizens staying in bed all day to keep warm. That’s not right, and this Government is committed to doing it better.

Offshore Oil and Gas Exploration—Consultation and Impact

9. JONATHAN YOUNG (National—New Plymouth) to the Minister of Energy and Resources: What is she doing to promote informed investment decisions about minerals exploration and production, as required by the Crown Minerals Act—[Member resumed seat]

SPEAKER: Can the member finish the question, please?

Jonathan Young: —1991? Sorry, sir.

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Minister of Energy and Resources): Since becoming Minister, I have been engaging with a range of stakeholders where mineral exploration and production have been discussed. For example, next week I’ll be attending the minerals forum in Queenstown, where I’ll give a ministerial address to delegates and attend a stakeholder dinner. I have met with the industry peak body group and worker representatives to discuss Government direction and policies, and I have visited Oceania’s goldmine in Waihī. I also note that in March this year my officials from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment participated in a large international showcase in Canada to promote investment in New Zealand’s mineral potential.

Jonathan Young: Did she intend her decision to end new offshore exploration to be a signal to the international investors and bankers to avoid New Zealand exploration—as that has been the outcome?

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS: I reject the premise in that question. What I would point out to the member is that, actually, the largest drop-off in surrenders in permits peaked in August last year, prior to the general election. I don’t know if that was the intention of the Government that member was a member of.

Jonathan Young: Will she repeat her commitment that Kiwi barbecues and businesses will not run short of gas because of the Government’s decision, as the Taranaki petroleum basin is now being described as mature and at a new low of reserves?

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS: I would note that that question is far away from the primary question that was put down that was around minerals, but, yes, I will give that member an assurance that his barbecue will have gas.

Jonathan Young: How does she expect to meet the gas shortages which are expected to be upon New Zealanders by the end of next year?

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS: Again, I point out that that question is so far from the primary question, but I would point that member—

SPEAKER: Order! The member will answer the question without reflecting on my judgment.

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS: Sorry. I would like to point that member to the figures released this week of what the gas reserves for New Zealand are, and that is good news. It is 10.5 years—that is pretty much the same as it has been for the last 20 years. It certainly isn’t the lowest projection of gas reserves that we have had, so that member should stop his scaremongering.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Could the Minister confirm, just in case she’s wrong that there is an emergency, that she could hook up to the National Party?

SPEAKER: Order!

Jonathan Young: Did the Minister comply with the Crown Minerals Act, which requires any changes to the minerals programme for petroleum to be publicly notified with opportunity for submissions, when the industry and other affected people were only informed the night before her 12 April decision was announced?

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS: I’d like to point out to that member that the block offer process is not an instrument of the Crown Minerals Act.

Jonathan Young: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I am not sure what to do about that answer, which had significant inaccuracy to it, because the minerals programme for petroleum is attached to the Crown Minerals Act, as an empowering piece—

SPEAKER: If the member thinks that the answer is inaccurate and that it is a deliberate inaccuracy, he will write to me, and that is the appropriate thing to do. If he thinks it’s an accidental inaccuracy, then he will write to the Minister. If it is inaccurate, I am absolutely certain the Minister will be back to correct it. But I’m not in a position, it being more than a decade since I had responsibility for the area, to answer the question.

Jonathan Young: Will she and the Prime Minister be holding any public meetings with the Taranaki community this coming Friday when they visit New Plymouth?

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS: The Prime Minister and I have a very full diary on Friday when we visit New Plymouth. We will be meeting with many members of the public from Taranaki, and we intend to hold a range of meetings. There are not public meetings scheduled.

Jonathan Young: What is her response to Transpower’s advice that New Zealand will need to more than double its electricity generation by 2050—the equivalent of 22 more Clyde Dams—and their caution that this represents a concentration of risk because substantially growing demand being met by increasingly intermittent energy sources is a concern?

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS: My response to that is that is exactly why this Government has started doing the necessary work to plan for that transition and that increase in capacity that will be required. It is precisely the reason why the transition to 100 percent renewable electricity is one of the first two tasks that the interim independent Climate Commission has started charting out the pathway on.

Hon James Shaw: Has New Zealand ever doubled its electricity generation in its history, and does she have faith in the electricity markets to be able to do that?

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS: Yes.

Budget 2018—Vote Māori Development

10. NUK KORAKO (National) to the Minister for Māori Development: Does she agree with all of the decisions made regarding Vote Māori Development in Budget 2018?

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA (Minister for Māori Development): Yes, alongside the broader context of priorities set by the coalition Government for Budget 2018, from which Māori whānau will undoubtedly benefit.

Nuk Korako: Can the Minister advise why she cut funding for Māori development?

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA: Funding for Māori development hasn’t been cut. In fact, what’s happened is that we’ve reprioritised and focused on areas which—[Interruption]

SPEAKER: I can hear the member, and the public can hear the member even if there’s a racket. So I advise the Minister just to keep going.

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA: Overall, the Vote Māori Development budget has not reduced. The Māori-specific initiatives more specifically focus on the areas that will ensure that young people will benefit, that whānau are able to develop their whenua, and that there will be a specific emphasis on papakāinga development, but, overall, the Budget gains for Māori will be seen in building up the public service in health, in education, and in a housing strategy that won’t see people sleeping in cars.

Nuk Korako: Is it the Minister’s intention to assimilate more Vote Māori Development funding into mainstream non - Māori-specific funding?

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA: No, but it is my intention to ensure that a Māori development strategy will lift well-being across a number of domains. I’m really proud of a Budget that sets a foundation that commits to investment in public health services, where people get responded to when they need it most, and education, but more importantly, in housing, because we know when people have a secure home they’re going to lead better lives.

Rino Tirikatene: What was the largest capital expenditure in Vote Māori Development prior to Budget 2018?

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA: Well, one would have thought—

SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! The member has no responsibility for that.

Nuk Korako: How, then, does the Minister explain the forecast reduction in the Vote Māori Development budget of between $6 million and $8 million every year for the next four years?

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA: Quite easily. The previous Government had set aside funds that were not actually spent or committed, and I’ll give you one example: the Māori Land Service, where money was set aside but not spent, because they tried to push through legislation which Māori didn’t like—quite simple.

Nuk Korako: So is the Minister saying she will assimilate more Māori-specific funding into mainstream non-Māori funding?

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA: No, and we also won’t contract out Māori aspiration. But what we will do is ensure, across the whole of the Government’s priorities, in the areas where Māori will benefit in health, in education, and in housing, as well as in Māori aspiration—we’ll make a big impact. This is the first Budget; two more to go. We will assess the gains at election time.

Hon Shane Jones: Can the Minister confirm that elements of her budget, when joined with the billion trees and the billion dollars, will lead to inordinately large positive outcomes for the Government in terms of Māori development?

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA: Absolutely, and I’m so pleased that that Minister is keen to ensure that land development and the way in which it can link into the regional development aspirations and planting of a billion trees will see huge gains for Māori.

Hon Kelvin Davis: What reports has the Minister seen on the largest capital expenditure pre - Budget 2018 in Vote Māori Development?

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA: Well, you would have thought that the previous—

SPEAKER: Order! Can the Minister repeat the question, please.

Hon Kelvin Davis: What reports has the Minister seen on the largest capital expenditure pre - Budget 2018 in Vote Māori Development?

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA: Well, you would have thought, with the housing crisis, housing might have been the biggest issue, but no. On closer investigation, the largest capital expenditure for Māori development prior to 2018 was not on young people, not on homes, not on land, but on renewing a vehicle fleet.

Nuk Korako: In light of the funding cuts to her ministry, Te Puni Kōkiri, in this Budget, does the Minister have full confidence in her ministry, particularly her CEO Michelle Hippolite?

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA: I’m working with the ministry to reset priorities based on this Government’s priorities and an agenda that seeks to reduce inequality and poverty. We’re proud of this first Budget. It will make a difference. There’s two more to go.

Nuk Korako: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I did ask, actually, a specific question. I don’t believe that I got the answer.

SPEAKER: Yes, and I will ask the Minister to approach the second leg of it.

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA: Yes.

Veterans—Veterans’ Support Act Review

MARK PATTERSON (NZ First): To the Minister for Veterans: what progress, if any—

SPEAKER: Order! We seem to have an increasing problem in the House of people not fully reading the questions. “Veterans’ Affairs”, I think the member means.

MARK PATTERSON: Sorry, it’s written differently on my sheet.

SPEAKER: Start again, please.

11. MARK PATTERSON (NZ First) to the Minister for Veterans: What progress, if any, has been made on the review of the operation of the Veterans’ Support Act 2014?

Hon RON MARK (Minister for Veterans): I thank the member for the question. This morning, I tabled in the House the report produced by the review of the operations of the Veterans’ Support Act 2014 carried out by Professor Ron Paterson of Auckland University. The review, a legislative requirement, began in June 2017, and due to high interest from the veterans’ community, with 700 personal submissions, 200 written submissions, and 13 public meetings, the review was extended by three months to the end of March 2018. It is a high-quality report with much for the Government to consider. How we support our veterans goes to the core of who we are as a country, and I encourage all veterans’ support communities, the veterans themselves, and families to read that report.

Mark Patterson: What will be the Government’s response to the review?

Hon RON MARK: The report makes a total of 64 recommendations. Some of these are low-hanging fruit: technical fixes that can be dealt with relatively easily and quickly, and we will. I have asked officials to begin work on these immediately. Some changes have already progressed, with Veterans’ Affairs working on five of the seven main recommendations as we speak. Other recommendations are more substantial and complex, so I’ve instructed Veterans’ Affairs to work through these. We’ll have a fully developed set of options and a plan for follow-up action by the end of this year. We’ll give all—

SPEAKER: Order! That’s enough. [Interruption] That is enough. That is enough.

Hon Maggie Barry: What specific initiatives is the Minister intending to introduce for contemporary veterans who are suffering now from mental health issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder?

Hon RON MARK: Some may have missed it, but we actually initiated a change last year when this Government announced a contribution of $25,000 to No Duff in recognition of the sterling work that they’re doing as first responders to contemporary veterans who are suffering the effects of post-traumatic stress injury. This year, in the Budget, we announced another $25,000 per year for the next four years. That is on top of the $250,000 per year to the RSA that that Government quashed in its time and that this Government has put back in place to assist with that very same—

SPEAKER: Order!

Hon Maggie Barry: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. The question was specifically around—

SPEAKER: And the question was certainly addressed—far too long.

Hon Maggie Barry: Not accurately.

SPEAKER: Order! We’ve had—sorry, would the member resume his seat. I probably should have stood up to rule on the matter, and the fact that I didn’t has probably saved the member from a similar punishment that went to Mr Brownlee. But I will not have comments of that sort on my rulings.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: What is the Minister’s view of the foul rumours that this review is all the work of the National Party and not this Government?

Hon RON MARK: Great question. There are some who believe that this is all the work of the National Party. It is appropriate to remind the House that this work commenced under a Labour - New Zealand First coalition Government back in September 2007 when the Government gave direction to the Law Commission to commence a review of the then outdated War Pensions Act. That review—

SPEAKER: Order! That’s certainly not only addressed but answered the question.

Clayton Mitchell: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Through the question that was just asked by the Rt Hon—

SPEAKER: It’s all right. I’m going to deal with that matter when I’ve worked out how I’m going to deal with it at the end of this question.

Mark Patterson: Will he consider the question of who should be defined as a veteran, which has been raised in this report?

Hon RON MARK: This is an interesting recommendation from Professor Paterson. The current Act does not take into consideration the concerns expressed by a lot of veterans that the definition of who is a veteran is outdated and out of place. That question falls outside of the review, but given the seriousness and given the number of submissions and given the strength of the feeling, we will commence work on this, and we will have some recommendations back to the Government on this matter before the end of the year.

Hon Maggie Barry: Will the Minister commit to merging the Veterans’ Health Advisory Panel into a new Veterans’ Advisory Board, as recommended in the review?

Hon RON MARK: If the member reads the report, which was just tabled this morning, you’ll see that that’s one of the recommendations. I will say this—

Hon Amy Adams: She just said that—she just said that.

Hon RON MARK: Settle petal—settle.

SPEAKER: Order! I think the member’s just sort of evened it up for Mr Brownlee, and it’s made my task slightly easier. He will stand, withdraw, and apologise. I just want to make it clear that that sort of sexist remark is not going to be accepted in the House. Stand, withdraw, and apologise.

Hon RON MARK: I withdraw and apologise.

Hon Todd McClay: No, you didn’t mean that.

Hon RON MARK: The question is a good question, and—

SPEAKER: Order! The member will resume his seat. [Pause in proceedings] Well, is the member going to do it or do I have to tell him?

Hon Todd McClay: I withdraw and apologise.

Hon RON MARK: The question is a good question. It’s one of the 64 recommendations that we’ll be working our way through, and I don’t anticipate that we will agree with all of the recommendations, but I will just leave the member with this: I do not intend for this report to sit in the bottom of my draw and gather dust. Every recommendation will be taken seriously—just watch and see.

Hon Maggie Barry: So regarding the treatment and rehabilitation provisions of the Act, which are referred to constantly through the warrant of fitness report, it would become apparent that a number of people are—

SPEAKER: Order! Order!—

Hon Maggie Barry: —not having regular check-ups.

SPEAKER: Question.

Hon Maggie Barry: What will the Minister do about that?

SPEAKER: No. Sorry, I probably overrode the member. Can the member ask a question, starting probably with a question word.

Hon Maggie Barry: So what will the Minister do about the difficulties around the provisions of regular check-ups no longer being dealt with for veterans? And their conditions have worsened as a result of that, so what will the Minister do now about it?

Hon RON MARK: That’s a really good question. I just wish the last Government had actually thought about it when it had the chance to do so. Can I take the opportunity to introduce the member to this new report, which has also been announced today, which is The Veteran Rehabilitation Strategy. Can I recommend it to the member for reading, because it deals with that very issue.

Hon Maggie Barry: So why was it that the Minister released this report, the warrant of fitness, which has been long awaited and potentially very contentious, on the same day as the report that he is about to launch in about three hours’ time? It’s confusing.

SPEAKER: No, no. I’ll get the Minister to answer the first part of the question. He’s got no responsibility for the second.

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Supplementary.

SPEAKER: No, no. Let him answer the question first.

Hon RON MARK: Thank you, Mr Speaker. I can only say to the member that we’re pretty busy. We’re churning out a lot of work. Both these reports—I got this report on Monday, and I felt it was a good idea to get it out as soon as we could. This report is ready to go, and it’s good timing to have both reports on the Table so that people can read them together. That’s a good idea, really, isn’t it?

Rt Hon Winston Peters: Can the Minister confirm that members of this Government will continue their proud record of caring for veterans in this country, and not just be fast on the lip and slow on the hip?

SPEAKER: The member can answer the first part of the question.

Hon RON MARK: Can I phrase it this way: this coalition Government takes seriously its duty of care and responsibility to veterans—the men and women who serve our nation in uniform. We also will be looking very closely at something that the previous Government would not touch, and that is a covenant between the Crown—the Government—and the men and women who serve in its forces to recognise the exceptional service they give, and a social contract between the Government and veterans.

Hon Maggie Barry: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Thank you, Mr Speaker. I waited until the questions had been asked before I raised this point of order, and I would like to clarify any confusion that might have arisen from the interjection that the Speaker held me up on earlier, which was not commenting on—

SPEAKER: No, no, no. Order! The member will resume her seat. Thank you.

Housing New Zealand—Banff Avenue Housing Development

12. DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT) to the Minister of Housing and Urban Development: Has Housing New Zealand performed to his expectations in relation to the Banff Avenue housing development?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD (Minister of Housing and Urban Development): I have full confidence in Housing New Zealand, which I expect to ramp up its building of public housing to help address the national housing crisis. Housing New Zealand has applied to Auckland Council for resource consent to redevelop their property at Banff Avenue. The biggest of the two 1970s buildings on the site is a fire risk and has been empty for some time. Housing New Zealand would like to replace the two buildings with 25 warm, dry, modern homes, including five units for tenants with accessibility needs.

David Seymour: How, then, is it possible that the Minister’s own officials, at a public meeting in Banff Ave just last Wednesday, admitted that they had performed poorly in consulting the community and building a stronger community there and apologised for their performance? Was the Minister even aware of that?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: Well, the organisation had advised me that it first wrote to neighbours in Banff Avenue on 18 January to inform them that the site was being investigated for redevelopment. Neighbours were informed on 10 May that a resource consent had been applied for. A feasibility study into the redevelopment was carried out between last October and April. During this time, architects, engineers, landscape architects, traffic engineers, and urban planners were engaged to make sure that this development is of top quality.

David Seymour: Given the Minister clearly has no idea what is happening on his watch, will he accept my invitation to come to the next public meeting at Banff Ave and learn more about his department and how it is performing in this project?

Rt Hon Winston Peters: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. No one can begin a question in the way that member did. It was a critical statement—totally false. He began by saying something that no one else has ever begun a question on in this House, and he should be stopped from doing so.

SPEAKER: The member’s absolutely right. The first part of the question was out of order. Because I’m in a generous mood, I will allow David Seymour to rephrase his supplementary in a way that is within the Standing Orders.

David Seymour: In light of the considerable disenchantment with Housing New Zealand’s performance in Banff Ave, will the Minister accept my invitation to come to the next public meeting and understand better how his own department has performed in this area so that we may build stronger communities together?

SPEAKER: Well, I’m going to get the member at some stage to come and get a tutorial on the asking of questions. I’m happy to give it to him, but, to save the House’s time, Phil Twyford will answer it.

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: I’m not going to be part of that member’s campaign of stigmatisation of people with mental health issues—pandering to the worst kind of nimbyism and people’s prejudices. He should show some leadership in his electorate.

Michael Wood: What statements has he seen about future tenants at the Banff Ave Housing New Zealand development?

SPEAKER: And I’m going to give the Minister warning—because I think I know what might be coming—that he cannot use patsy questions from the Government to attack an Opposition member.

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: One statement that I have seen is from the Mental Health Foundation, which has said that it is appalled by what it describes as a stigmatising letter from Epsom MP, David Seymour—

SPEAKER: OK, that’s enough. Thank you. The member will sit down.

Michael Wood: What efforts does Housing New Zealand make to ensure tenants in their new developments feel welcomed by the local community?

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: Many Housing New Zealand tenants have been through tough times, are elderly, or have disabilities, which means they need help with their accommodation. That is what State housing is for, and for these people, a new State house is a much-needed new start in life. Housing New Zealand works hard with local communities to make sure that they are comfortable with a new development and that their new tenants feel welcome. This often involves events like holding neighbourhood BBQs. I’m disappointed that Epsom MP, David Seymour, is creating a divisive—

SPEAKER: Order! Order! The member will resume his seat. He will apologise to the House now for breaching my direct instruction to him two supplementary questions ago, and tomorrow the National Party will benefit from an un-named extra supplementary as a result of his deliberate breach.

Hon PHIL TWYFORD: I apologise.

David Seymour: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I just wonder if the Leader of the House would like to indulge in his occasional custom of giving the ACT Party an extra supplementary.

SPEAKER: I see no movement in that direction.

Budget Debate

Budget Debate

Debate resumed from 22 May.

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister of Education): It is a great time to be a New Zealander. The economy is going well, and this Government is getting New Zealand’s public services back on track after nine years of neglect. We are rebuilding the public services that we know New Zealanders need and deserve. Our Budget is in surplus and will continue to be in surplus. Government debt as a percentage of GDP is going to fall under this Government, and we are going to get our public services back on track by increasing our investment in them.

I am particularly proud of the changes that we have made in the education system as part of this year’s Budget. It is the biggest increase in education spending in over a decade. We are dealing with the increase in demand that our education services are facing through early childhood education (ECE) and all the way through, and we are ensuring that our education system is equipped to deliver New Zealanders the education that they will need in the future.

We’re starting with early childhood education. People who came with us on the campaign trail, who attended any meetings that I was speaking at, would have known that I spoke about early childhood education and special needs education, or learning support, as being my two highest priorities for additional funding in education, and we are absolutely delivering on that as part of this year’s Budget. Early childhood education is getting its first universal cost adjustment for early learning centres since 2008. It is the biggest increase in early childhood education funding in over a decade—200,000 Kiwi kids will benefit from the extra investment we are making in ECE services. Over 4,000 providers will benefit from this increase in funding for early childhood education.

When it came to dealing with the schools budget, we were faced with the biggest forecast increase in student numbers in decades. That’s the biggest increase in the overall number of kids attending our schools in decades. We have to put significant extra funding in to employ more teachers, to build more classrooms—more schools, even—just to ensure that we are keeping up with demand, and this Budget delivers on that: almost $1 billion going into the education system to cope with the increasing population. Almost $1 billion of the $1.6 billion that we are putting in is going in to cope with the increasing student population, and that’s something to be proud of. That means another 1,500 additional teachers in our schools to cope with growing student rolls. That’s something to be proud of. We will build, quite literally, hundreds of new classrooms for our schools, and we’ll be building a few new schools as well, as part of that.

We will be continuing with the Christchurch rebuild. I think New Zealanders would be somewhat surprised that the previous Government, when they said they were going to spend $1.1 billion to do the Christchurch schools rebuild, didn’t actually set aside the money to do that at the time. We are going to continue with the rebuild, and this year’s Budget delivers the latest instalment to ensure that it can happen.

We are also delivering on the additional support required for children with additional learning needs: $21 million is going into additional early intervention services. That’s 8,000 more pre-schoolers who will get additional support for their learning needs before they start school, getting them off on the very best foot when it comes to their journey in education. A thousand additional students will get additional funding through ORS, the ongoing resourcing scheme. ORS provides additional teacher-aides, additional specialist support, and additional teaching time to support those kids with the highest level of need. I am absolutely proud that we have been able to put the support in for the extra thousand students as part of that scheme. [Interruption] Mr Speaker, I’m going to ask my two colleagues who are immediately to my right to maybe have their conversation in the lobby so that I can actually do my speech. That would be very kind of them. This isn’t Dancing with the Stars, Mr Seymour. I’m also very proud of the fact that—

SPEAKER: Order! I am going to interrupt the member and ask the two members to take their discussion somewhere else. Thank you.

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: I’m particularly proud of the fact that 2,900 students with hearing impairments or who are deaf are going to be getting the support that they need as part of this year’s Budget. Fifteen hundred students who are blind or hard of vision will be getting additional support as part of this year’s Budget. That is something that we can be particularly proud of.

I also want to talk about lifelong education. We know that education is a lifelong journey. We know that, increasingly, people are going to have to move in and out of the education system throughout their life. That is one of the reasons why this Government, in delivering the first year of post-school education and training for free, ensured that it was available to adults who have not participated in education and training before, because we know that some of those most vulnerable workers, the people who might lose their jobs and find themselves having to retrain and re-educate, could be some of the biggest beneficiaries from this proposal. So the first year free is going to make a big difference to the people who need to re-educate and retrain, and we know that it’s already making a difference to many of them.

But I also want to point out that it’s making a big difference to future generations of New Zealanders as well. I want to talk particularly about how young New Zealanders are able to avoid debt in their studies when they leave school. A $151 million decrease in student loan borrowing as a result of the first year free policy—and that is only in the first quarter. That is only in the first quarter. Twenty-five thousand—25,500, in fact—fewer students borrowing to pay for fees under the student loan scheme as a result of the first year free. I think that is something that this Government should be particularly proud of because it means that those people are going to be getting out of debt faster once they complete their studies or their training. That means that they’re going to be able to get on with their lives. They’re going to be able to save for a deposit for a house. They’re going to be able to put money into their families. That is because of this Government’s approach to delivering a fairer education system where cost is not a barrier to participation. I think that this Government’s commitment to education is evident in this year’s Budget.

I want to talk about some of the other funding increases that we have made, because it’s important to remember that we’ve got a teacher supply crisis in New Zealand. An extra $20 million is going into supporting teacher supply initiatives to ensure that we’ve got enough teachers in our classrooms. We know that we are already short of teachers and that if we don’t do something about it, that problem is going to get worse. The Voluntary Bonding Scheme, which is also a teacher supply package, gets an additional $6.4 million.

Now, here’s one that people don’t talk about very much: an extra $34.5 million to provide additional support for English for speakers of other languages in schooling. When we have a significant migrant population, a significant refugee population, we’ve got to make sure that we’re actually supporting those people through the education system, and we know that language and the unsupported number of people who have English as their second language is a challenge for our school system. The $34.5 million extra funding will ensure that we are meeting that need.

I want to thank our partners in Government, New Zealand First and the Green Party, for the way that we have been able to work together to deliver on the commitments that we have made in education. Of course, there is more to deliver. There is more to be done, and we will do that over the next few Budgets. I do want to be clear, however, that some of the scaremongering that’s gone on is bordering on the incredible as well as the desperate—for example, the suggestion that we’ve cut funding for the Education Review Office, which I saw in a press statement yesterday. That’s because the Education Review Office refitted their offices last year and we’re not going to have them refitting their offices again this year. It’s also because they got an insurance payout from Revera House, which is being demolished. And, no, they’re not going to get the same insurance payout again next year; that’s not generally the way insurance payouts work, but to suggest that that’s a funding cut is somewhat desperate. The idea that we’ve cut funding for teacher salaries because we’ve chosen to reinvest the funding that the previous Government failed to spend on their Investing in Educational Success initiative is also bordering on the incredible and the desperate.

The education package in this year’s Budget is one to be proud of. I’m proud of the whole Budget. It is the first step on a three-year path to rebuild our public services.

Hon Paula Bennett: Mr Speaker?

SPEAKER: No, the member will resume her seat. The member, as she left, indicated to me that she would not be returning today, and, after she did that, she made an unparliamentary comment as she was leaving the House. I’m not going to stop her changing her mind about coming back in the House, but if I’d known she was coming back—if I thought she wanted to stay—I would have required her to withdraw and apologise. In fact, I probably should have sent for her to do that. She will withdraw and apologise now for the comment she made as she left the House.

Hon PAULA BENNETT (Deputy Leader—National): I withdraw and apologise. I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I have absolutely no idea what I said or what you’re talking about.

SPEAKER: The member will resume her seat. What she should know is that when she is walking out of the House, she should not make parting comments of a negative type to the Speaker. I know that well; I’ve done it before. I’ve been brought back in to withdraw and apologise and then sent out again. She’s pretty lucky.

Hon Paula Bennett: Speaking to the point of order, the other—

SPEAKER: No, no, there is no further speaking to the point of order. The member can either take the call—

Hon PAULA BENNETT (Deputy Leader—National): I’ll take a call, because the point I’d like to make is I’m delighted to be back here for the Budget debate. My leaving today was for question time, and it’s great to come back to actually have an opportunity to discuss this appalling Budget and to actually go through some of the things that are actually terribly wrong with it.

It’s quite interesting, because I note, Mr Speaker, that there might be concerns about things that have and haven’t been said from different people as they’re leaving or as they’re in this House. I, of course, would make no comments, and we have had incidences where you’ve misheard. So I think we better be careful with that.

I must say the Prime Minister’s lost her smile—yeah? A lot of people are saying that. They’re sort of saying they can’t quite see that same smile that she promised us we were going to be seeing. But there is someone smiling, colleagues, there is someone smiling, and the person that’s smiling is Winston Peters. You can see that smile. This is a man that, of course, no longer puts New Zealand first but puts the Pacific first. So he’ll fight for nearly a billion dollars for the Pacific but hasn’t fought for a billion dollars for New Zealanders, which I’d like to see, absolutely. He, of course, fought for good-looking horses. So, I mean, that’s important. And, of course, we’ve got Winston’s winter payment. So the man has a lot to smile about, you’ve got to say, and you have to see that the Prime Minister’s really on the defensive about this Budget and having to defend it as much as she possibly can, instead of actually being proud of it, which, if they’d done a decent job, I’m sure she would have been.

I can’t help but reflect back to a time when we came into Government and the global financial crisis was hitting. It wasn’t that long afterwards—a couple of years later—that we saw the Christchurch earthquakes. As someone who, certainly at that point, was with social development, the acuteness of and the devastation of something that big kind of grabs you. I am proud that, as a Government, we at that time made sure that we were supporting New Zealand, supporting Christchurch. It’s quite interesting that we get history already trying to be rewritten by the current Government, but what we did was we borrowed money so that we could actually put that into Christchurch, we could put it into the areas that desperately needed to be done.

We made sure that we didn’t cut welfare. We made sure that we were actually investing back in big building projects, transport projects, and infrastructure through the global financial crisis. Most households would understand that. When times are tough, and when you really need to, those are times when you might borrow money. Those are times when you might make sure that you’re able to keep up with the household budget, do the necessities that you need to do, and if the car breaks down like we sort of saw in Christchurch, you might borrow a bit more to get it up and running and do what you need to do.

Households in New Zealand are completely flabbergasted at this Budget. They are flabbergasted because here we are in some of the best economic times, here we are in a time when most households would turn around and say, “This is when we don’t borrow, but instead we put a bit aside.” This is the time when we don’t need to take more taxes off people and hard-earning—we keep hearing about the “squeezed middle” from the Prime Minister. The “squeezed middle” is currently being squeezed by such high fuel prices, and this is a Government that’s going to put more taxes on them and make them pay more to fill up their tanks. How do they explain that to the people of South Auckland that they purport to care so much about? This is why they’ve come in, to actually help those people, and yet they are the people that most need the use of their vehicles to get to their jobs and who often work outside of normal work hours.

These are the very people that, right now, when they pull up to that pump, are wondering how they can afford to put petrol in it. They know that they are going to be charged around $700 more from this Government as those extra taxes are put on. As one family said to me, as I knocked on a door in Northcote on the weekend, “That means my family going without a meal each week.”, because that’s the real effect of the extra taxes that this Government is putting on some of the poorest New Zealanders who can least afford it. I just think that that is absolutely terrible.

So they borrow more, but they aren’t even spending in the areas where they have been talking up a crisis. So we are not seeing the billions upon billions of dollars that they promised to our health sector. Where is the money, I shout out, for mental health and drug and alcohol awareness? Where is the money for those places you promised our communities would be put there from the Government, for those very people depending on them that voted for you?

Where is the promise of a winter payment that was coming in in May? Where is that promise in this Budget? The excuse that we couldn’t implement it, and yet we can implement a payment to nearly 300,000 students, all with their different ways of needing it and everything else, but we can’t give a winter payment to some of the people that need it most. I say “some” on purpose, because, actually, it’s not targeted. It goes to all of those people that need it. Millionaires get it. We’re going to see some members of this House get it, which seems incredible to me.

Which does make me go—shall we move to KiwiBuild? It does move me to KiwiBuild, because there are members in this House that could possibly qualify for a KiwiBuild house. There are, seriously, members who do not own a home and, because there’s no income limit on it, they, seriously, could qualify for a KiwiBuild home. Now, that is not KiwiBuild; that is “KiwiFraud”, and that is completely, utterly crazy.

I can’t help but touch on the tertiary. The member who spoke before me has made grand statements that we are going to see a 15 percent increase in those that are studying in tertiary—“Hey, just to be clear, we’ll take it in apprentices. If it comes to it, we’d like to see more apprentices.” We keep hearing from them that we need more builders, we need more of those in construction, we need more teachers, and we need more nurses—“We’ll take it in a whole lot of areas; it doesn’t just have to be in the tertiary academic field.” Here we go: Treasury are projecting 900 fewer. So for all of that over $2 billion spend on the fees-free, we are not seeing any increase in the number of students or apprentices—or apprentices.

I think New Zealanders are sitting at home and they are saying, “So we are actually being squeezed in the middle. We have increased costs coming because of the Government that we have. We have the more bizarre spending on more diplomats and carpet in Sweden than we have on actual New Zealanders that are genuinely struggling. We have over $2 billion going to tertiary that is making no impact or difference whatsoever on student numbers; in fact, we’re seeing a projection that those numbers will drop.”—and they feel robbed. They feel completely robbed of what they were promised repeatedly from this Government while they were on the campaign trail and while they’ve been in Government, and actually making those sorts of statements.

I can’t help but go through some of them, because there are so many broken promises that we have seen. So we absolutely heard “No new taxes”, and what have we got? We’ve got taxes. We’ve absolutely got over $2 billion in additional revenue from fuel tax increases. Health—of course, we repeatedly heard that health is in crisis and this is the worst, and yet they’re spending less than we did. So then we get the big shout out, “Well, that’s because you’re counting the payment to carers.” Well, yeah, that counts. Actually, that is a payment to health workers and that counts, just as the Government is counting midwives and the payments to them—actually, it’s entirely appropriate. So we’re seeing less spending in health.

Now, we were promised, universally, that nearly 4 million New Zealanders would see a reduction in their GP visits. What have we got instead? Maybe 600,000, a bit targeted, not happening now—and, as we heard Chris Hipkins say in the House yesterday, “it’s not a broken promise; it’s just something we haven’t delivered.” Just to be really clear: “it’s not a broken promise; it’s just something we haven’t delivered.”

Let’s get to police. I see the shadow spokesman for police in the House, and that’s an interesting one. So we’re, what—we’re at 1,800; we’re at 1,100; we’ve got 700 special police; it’s going to be in three years; it’s going to be in five years; we’ve budgeted for all 1,800 but they’re not going to be coming now until 2023, even though he said they’d come in three, even though he’s told them repeatedly that they wouldn’t be able to do that. It’s absolutely terrible.

They were going to cut immigration. Well, you know, they’re pretty quiet on that one now, and we don’t see too much of that happening in this Budget.

I’ll tell you what, the one that gets me the most—in my last 15 seconds—is the donations to schools. So schools have not been fund-raising, they have not been asking teachers for their donations, because they were promised something from this Government that simply has not been delivered. They should be ashamed of it if this is the best they can do.

Hon ANDREW LITTLE (Minister of Justice): Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, in the face of that tirade, there’s only one response, really: “Oh dear!” I might go on to say, “How sad.” and “Never mind.” It is a pity that that member, Paula Bennett, cannot see the incredible benefits of this incredible Budget, produced by an incredible finance Minister, the Hon Grant Robertson, under the stewardship of our incredible Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern.

I just want to help that member to cast her mind back and remember a few important things, because she talks with great relish about how even when they were elected at the time of the global financial crisis and very shortly after had the Canterbury earthquakes, they were able to borrow money and prop things up. Well, they were able to borrow money because the Government balance sheet from the previous Government was so strong. The Government balance sheet meant that that Government was in a position to fund through the things that they now complain about being funded, oddly enough. But I don’t get the other side’s argument about this Budget, and, even within that last speech, we heard “They’re spending too much; they should be putting some aside and saving it.”, and then it’s “They’re not spending enough; they should be spending more.”

Now, what is it—what is it they want? Well, the truth is that this is a transformational Budget, and I say to this House: welcome to the beginning of the transformation. This is going to be incredible, this is going to be great, and, of course, this is the second instalment, within six months, of this transformational Government. Just before Christmas, we had the Families Package and we had the commitment to the first year fees-free for post-school education. This Budget continues the progress. This Budget lays the foundation for an ambitious package of change for the better and the years ahead.

You see, the thing is this: there is a fundamental difference between the members opposite and the members on this side of the House. You see, the members opposite, when they are in Government, they are concerned about numbers; they are concerned about the big end of town; they are concerned about being cheered on by the banks, the finance houses, and the incredibly wealthy. They live in hope, and they lived in hope for nine years that the fast-rising wealth of the few would start to benefit even just a little bit of the many, but it never did. Trickle-down doesn’t work, and it’s not going to work, which is why this Government is committed to a better way.

You see, our way starts with people—not some people but everyone—and a sense of fairness; a sense of equality of opportunity; and a sense that we are in a country where everyone can do well if we steward the nation’s resources, manage our environment, and look after people in the better way that we’ve been doing. We are a Government that says everyone must have a chance: that everyone must have a chance to stand on their own two feet and that everyone must have a chance to get ahead in life and make their own decisions and make their own choices. Ours is a Government that believes in everyone enjoying the safety and security of a peaceful, stable country; one that is at peace with its past. That’s what we’re about. That’s our vision. It starts with people, and so this Government has very quickly focused on people. It has enacted the poverty relief measures: the Families Package last year that’s already started to kick in, with more to take effect from 1 July.

With our incredible education Minister, the Hon Chris Hipkins, we are starting to transform education. We’re not lurching into a whole bunch of changes and pulling things out of mid-air, like charter schools, but we’re engaging with people—engaging with parents, the communities, the teachers, and the principals—and actually talking about what a modern, 21st century education system looks like, and starting to prepare the way. The money in this Budget allocated to education is just a phenomenal achievement, particularly around those operations grants, because we know what schools have been struggling with. They’ve been struggling with the fact that operations grants have been frozen for three years, with no extra money put in, in spite of rising costs for education. So that is a great achievement.

It doesn’t stop at education. I’m going to come back to education because, as justice Minister, actually, what we do in education is vital if we’re going to continue the programme that we’ve got, which is about having a justice system that makes sure that we do our best to keep people out of prison.

Let me turn to the other thing about people. We know that the last Government presided over one of the worst housing crises we’ve ever seen—40,000-plus people homeless. That’s a 2013 figure; just imagine when we get the figures from the latest census—but 40,000-plus people not in their own home, most of them in overcrowded housing. Now we have a commitment, under the incredible housing and urban development Minister, the Hon—

Hon Members: Phil Twyford.

Hon ANDREW LITTLE: Our man Phil Twyford is now embarking on a plan to transform our housing market and the availability of housing, and make housing more accessible, including for first-home buyers. Long overdue—addressing that core social need to have a roof over your head, a place that you can call your own. That’s what Governments on this side of the House represent. That’s what this coalition Government, in joining its forces together with our three parties, is doing and is achieving, and it’s going to make an incredible difference. Already, the commitment is that this winter, we will significantly reduce the number of people going without a roof over their head during these ugly winter months—what a great achievement.

We don’t stop at just building houses. We’ve also got our commitment to health, and I know the previous speakers defend what they do—that they had to spend an extra $2 billion on health to pay for a pay claim that they spent five years resisting and rejecting, and, finally, because they lost all the options, they had to do something. They cannot claim credit for that. That was the work of some incredible people and incredible unions, who brought that together.

But now we have, under an incredible health Minister, the Hon David Clark, a commitment to rebuild our health sector and to make health available to those who need it, with an emphasis on primary healthcare and increasing the number of those who will get access to free GPs visits—what an achievement. We have a commitment to doing something about the crisis in our mental health system—not lurching around reacting, but actually talking to the sector, talking to people, talking to the families of those who are afflicted with mental health issues, and talking to the mentally unwell themselves about what is needed to fix that system up. What a commitment. What a change from what we’ve had for the last nine years.

I want to talk a bit about justice, because that’s the area that I’m responsible for. We are embarking on the discussion, the planning, and the debate that is going to transform our criminal justice system, so that we stop having a rise in violent crime—which had started under the last Government—we stop this massive increase in our prison population, and we actually have a criminal justice system that takes people and says, “You’ve done wrong, you’re going to be called to account, and because, for most of you, we know that your wrongdoing is the consequence of a bunch of other things in your life, we’re going to work with you to fix you up, so you can return to being a productive citizen again. You can return to make your contribution, to live your life in safety and in peace.”, and says to the rest of the community, “This is the way we build safe communities.” We’ll add the police that will keep our communities safe, we’ll work with victims and provide better victim support and better victim services than we have now, and we’ll work with offenders to turn their lives around and make them good again. It won’t affect every offender. There are some hardened offenders who will never change, and they are the people for whom the prison system is there.

But the reason why I celebrate this Budget is because of the commitments that we are making in things like education and in housing. We know—in fact, the members opposite know, because they had a great MP once upon a time: an MP called Paul Hutchison, who chaired the Health Committee and chaired an inquiry into the first thousand days of a new person’s life, and the importance of those first thousand days, and the things that a Government should be doing to make sure the best is provided for new people—new arrivals, newborns—to make sure they get a good start in life. That was a National MP who led that amazing project, and I had the privilege of sitting on that select committee when Paul Hutchison led it and wrote an amazing report that is the basis of the thinking of this Government and of progressive parties around the world. That’s how good it was.

He said if we get it right in education, if we get it right in early childhood education—as this Budget does—we get it right in the primary schools—as this Budget does—and we get it right in the secondary schools—as this Budget does—then we can do a whole lot more to prevent young people slipping through the cracks and to recognise that a lot of young people need a different style of education, a different style of learning, to make education relevant to them. Make sure they leave school with good literacy standards and good numeracy standards—that is not just the start of an excellent education system but a start to making sure we reduce future numbers of offenders in our system.

Hon ALFRED NGARO (National): It’s been a great weekend. I managed to survive the Sky Tower challenge: 1,103 steps in 52 flights, and for a great cause.

Along with that in the weekend, I had a number of different interviews from different journalists, and the question that they asked me was “Alfred, we want you to sum up the Budget in your own words, but you cannot use the word ‘broken’ and you cannot use the word ‘promises’.” So I called it, first of all, a no-frills Budget, but the other thing I called it was a “bubble and squeak Budget”. I know many members in the House who have been around for a while will know what bubble and squeak is. Bubble and squeak—that’s right, in the puku—was from a time when, actually, it first started with a bit of cabbage and a bit of meat. It was the leftovers from the meal the day before, and then after the 1950s, it changed. It became more about sort of leftover potatoes and a bit of cabbage and peas, and so forth. So, in other words, it’s a refry—a rehash—of what was before.

They said to me, “So why is it that you’re turning around and actually using bubble and squeak as an example of this Budget?”, and my reply was this: “Because all they’ve done is rehash all the things that National had been doing in nine years. It was just a rehash.” In other words, they took all the good things. It was a great meal the night before—the nine years of a National-led Government—and then it was left in the fridge, and instead of going out and cooking something new, they decided to take out the old potatoes and the cabbage and they refried it.

If you make those statements, you’ve got to back it up, and I would back it up by the fact that Rod Oram, who, many people will know, is an economist, was writing about the Budget speech, and here’s what he said. He said that this Budget is “more of a patch-up job for the past than a … transformation for the future.” He went on to comment in his article on the fact that all they’ve done is taken all the old things that were done before—the things that were done under a National-led Government—and they’ve just rehashed them. That’s all they’ve done. So that’s why I call this the “bubble and squeak Budget”.

But let’s get a bit of fact in there so that we can prove the fact that this has all been rehashed. So let’s go to children—right—let’s go to the children’s aspect of it. This is from the Prime Minister’s press release—the headline policies that the Prime Minister was declaring were really important for vulnerable children and for children in our society dealing with issues of poverty and so forth. Here’s the first thing—the first bullet point that’s been put out in the Prime Minister’s release—“extending free doctors’ visits and prescriptions to under 14-year-olds”—under-14-year-olds. Now, we know that’s not earth-shattering. Why—because under a National-led Government, we’d already done that. We’d extended it from zero to 13, which included prescriptions and also included after-hours care, as well. So nothing new; just a little extension. Yes, it’s 56,000 newly eligible children, but, again, that’s the old mashed potatoes and a bit of cabbage coming back out again, OK? It’s just a rehash of what we had done before.

Let’s take the second bullet point from the Prime Minister. Remember, we’re waiting for some earth-shattering issues. The second bullet point is “expanding school-based health services to cover decile 4 secondary schools”—decile 4 secondary schools. Under National, we had already extended school-based health visits to cover decile 1 to 3 secondary schools, so, again, it’s a refry. It’s a little extension from what has already been established. It is the second bullet point, by the way—the second bullet point, so it’s nothing earth-shattering. Here’s the third one—surely there’s got to be something new. We’re expecting that this is going to be amazing, this is going to be something new. The third bullet point is “increasing the number of children in early childhood education” (ECE). Now, that sounds important. That’s important. We all agree with that. But under National we had already increased the number of children in ECE to 96.6 percent—96.6 percent. So I’m not sure what’s going to be earth-shattering, what’s going to be great news, about this. Again, it’s another refry from what had already happened under a National-led Government.

But we carry on, because we’ve got to get those bullet points out. The fourth bullet point is “increasing access to additional learning support and the amount of support each child gets, with an additional $284 million investment over four years”. Well, that sounds interesting. Again, it’s extending it out. It’s nothing really extra-new under the ongoing resourcing scheme funding, but here’s the thing that I think is really important—and I’m glad that others have seen this—for just 1 percent of that funding, if we’re talking about children that are in need, the Government could have saved the Stand Children’s Services camps in Roxburgh.

If we’re talking about caring for the vulnerable, talking about those in need, we know that the community has already come out. They’ve rallied together. They’ve made a petition. They’ve come down here to Wellington. They’ve met with the two different Ministers—the Prime Minister and the Minister for Children—and even the chief executive of Oranga Tamariki. They petitioned to them, and, yes, it was $3 million to keep those two camps, Ōtaki and Roxburgh, but they were greatly disappointed, because they didn’t get anything. In fact, what we do know is they’ve included the ad twice again in the Otago Daily Times, and here’s what it says, by Tremain: “The talk: ‘When we are the Government, children’s welfare will be a priority!’ The walk: Roxburgh children’s village—closed.” And here are two little children saying, “Well, we’ve missed out in the general lolly scramble, unlike the America’s Cup, Pacific Islands, and everyone else.” That’s what our community are judging this Budget by. It really has to say to you that there are a lot of very disappointed people, as well.

Let’s talk about the fifth bullet point—again, on the Prime Minister’s list of targets—“grants for low-income home owners to insulate and heat their homes”. We know that Warm Up New Zealand: Heat Smart was initiated by the National-led Government. Over 500,000 homes have been warmed up with that subsidy. That’s right across the whole of the nation. That’s got to be impressive. So what are we going to do? They’re going to refry it again. They’re going to introduce it again. There is nothing new inside this Budget that says to us, actually, it’s making a difference. Here’s the fifth bullet point: “providing $105 million over four years for a clothing allowance for children supported by an Orphans or Unsupported Child’s benefit, which was previously limited only to children in care”. I was part of the working group that came together. It was a very small group, and the Hon Tracey Martin was on that group, as well. Together, we worked together around the equity of the allowance. This work had already been done. It had already been costed under a National-led Government. So here’s another announcement—nothing new.

Hon Ruth Dyson: Show us the money.

Hon ALFRED NGARO: The money was already in there. The $105 million was already there, Ruth Dyson. It was already allocated. But here’s the thing: it’s the fifth bullet point from the Prime Minister—nothing new. It’s the same old thing. It’s a refry. It’s a rehash. It’s the mashed potatoes. Let’s say it’s got a bit of kūmara in there and cabbage. It’s the same old thing over and over again. Nothing new. We have to say there’s a real concern.

I have to say that I’ve been out and about, and there’s been a lot of disappointment. So we can talk about what we judge the Budget by, but there’s nothing like the getting the view of the community that’s out there. So who is disappointed? The teachers are disappointed. As soon as the Budget was released, the PR that went out was clearly this: teachers are disappointed with the Government’s Budget. They say it has failed to address the key problems that are facing schools. That’s from the teachers’ union: people are disappointed. “More could have been done”—this is the Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Social Workers—“to tackle [the] urgent social challenges.” Again, they are not always too friendly towards a National-led Government, so here are they saying that it’s not good. The midwives—I love this word “devastated”—are absolutely devastated, because more could have been done. In fact, many of the midwives said that actually, at that announcement, it’s time to quit. They’ve had enough. They’re not going to do it.

But here’s the one that’s really got to hurt, and that’s in regard to Whānau Ora. I know that that’s got to hurt, because they have even said it themselves, and these are straight from the words of Merepeka Raukawa-Tait for Te Pou Matakana. Here’s what she said: it was “a kick in the guts”. It was “a Budget of broken promises.” Why—because they’d been promised $20 million. It has become a political football, and—excuse the pun, I didn’t mean to; this was the only brown football that I had—it had become deflated. Whānau Ora was a promise that was made to Māori in regard to what they would do, and here’s what they said to me, even today. Go and ask: “Was there a Budget bid? Was there a Budget bid? And if there was, what were the reasons why it was turned down?” Twenty million dollars was actually asked for. It’s what they promised. Nothing actually happened. Why—because New Zealand First has said this: “You’ve got to get it right before we can support it.” That’s right. It is a political football, and the people are saying actually that’s not good enough. [Places football on desk]

SPEAKER: The member will take it down to the bench now—the football.

Hon ALFRED NGARO: Oh—the football down? Thank you, Mr Speaker. It just gets better in the sense of what people are saying. I want to finish off in my few moments actually going again, and this is what Rod Oram has to say in finalising his views on the Budget, which I think actually sums up what we feel on this other side, and many people out there in the community feel. Here’s what he says: “Judging by our current Government’s performance to date and its first Budget, it has yet to summon up the courage, creativity and political will to rise to the even bigger challenge of change we face today.” For all the talk, for all the aspects of wanting to do something new, all the bullet points that the Prime Minister put out in her press release about this Budget, there is nothing new. It is bubble and squeak—a rehash, a refry of the old stuff into something new.

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA (Minister for Māori Development): It’s pretty evident, having listened to that speech, that that member Alfred Ngaro has overcooked that bubble and squeak analogy. In fact, there’s been more bubble and more squeak in the points that that member has made than we’ve heard through the whole Budget debate. What a laugh—what a laugh. But cheer up—cheer up. People will judge this Budget not by the negative sentiment of members in the Opposition but by how they feel about a change in Government, and, in fact, throughout all our communities we know that the mood and the sentiment are high, because they can feel the change in the air. So there’s no bubble, no squeak from this side of the House.

In fact, there’s a very real urgency to start to turn around a ship that had gone in the wrong direction, that had seen too many people left behind, that had heard about a rock star economy—but that rock star economy was only for rock stars. In fact, what we know on this side of the House, in all the bubble and squeak talk that’s happened on that side of the House, is that the mood is changing. It’s a serious kind of opportunity for people to reset and say, “We can be a better country. Our communities can feel better. Our regions can operate the way that they’re supposed to, because we’ve got a Government who works for us.” Organisations who are committed to supporting those most vulnerable feel supported. The mood is changing, and it’s serious business.

But this is just the first Budget of three in this term of Government. In fact, the Minister of Finance, in his very difficult role to try to get the balance of interests right, to try to apply our Budget fiscal responsibility approach, has tried to ensure that the balance is going to be right for addressing the serious issues and setting a platform of change that shows New Zealanders we can be a different country, a more caring country, a kind country, a country that doesn’t want see the gap between the very rich and the very poor get larger but, in fact, wants to close that gap, and that’s why we’re doing the types of things that we are doing. He’s got a Budget fiscal responsibility plan that will see surpluses, pay down debt, see modest investments in key areas, make structural change, and see a progressive taxation system deliver a fairer outcome to far more people. But that has meant that our Government—our coalition Government—has had to have some very difficult conversations.

So we’re not saying that in this first Budget everything can be delivered all at once. Yes, some people are disappointed, but by and large, on balance, they can see where we’re going and what we’re trying to do to turn this ship around and get it back on track. Investing in our public healthcare system and in our education services is really important. Why? Because we know that when people need healthcare most—when they need to go to the hospital, when they need it most—they need the assurance of a good healthcare system, one where what you have in your pocket doesn’t compromise your need to get healthcare when you need it most. That’s a caring Government.

We know that the future of our economy relies on investment in a quality public education system. There’s been a lot of bubble and squeak about that side of our investment decision, but we’ll stand by it every time. We’ll stand by it every time because no matter what’s in your pocket, you can rely on a public education system to deliver the very best outcomes for your children, your grandchildren—in fact, lifelong learning outcomes for many more New Zealanders. That’s where things are going to.

But when people break this Budget down, it’s actually about how they feel about more money in early childhood, more money for special-needs education, more money going towards teachers—in fact, ensuring that we’re going to have far more teachers in front of our kids, helping them learn and prepare for the modern economy. It’s about making sure that our schools aren’t run down. These are the types of things that people judge a Budget by: how they feel about where we’re putting our investment priorities. And we’ll stand by that, because we know it does make a difference.

But let’s get back to basics, because many of us on this side of the House—without the bubble and squeak—actually campaigned on bread-and-butter issues that would assure people that we’d get the basics right first. We’d get the basics right first: a thriving regional economy, where we could be assured that we were growing jobs here in New Zealand, for our people to be able to secure some local opportunities.

The commitment to the regional investment fund will ensure that we can partner some of those opportunities. But we can’t do it by ourselves. In fact, every member of this Government has realised that the kinds of conversations where we are encouraging collaboration, to ensure regional growth and opportunity investments can deliver outcomes, require a whole lot of people not only talking together but working together. That’s the type of mood change that’s happening. I’m really keen to ensure that we can continue with this effort, because by the third Budget we’ll be able to ensure that we can speak to these stories locally as we represent many communities throughout New Zealand.

I come back to the real criticisms that have been raised about the “bubble and squeak” package around the Māori development—specific issues. Now, I thought long and hard: how do you approach this kind of a question when you’re actually criticising the previous Government? I found it really hard, because in the Māori development space, every gain is a gain. But you’ve got to ask yourself: when funds were spent on initiatives where there was one million dollars here, two million there, three million there, and some initiatives were only funded for a year and not carried on—you’ve got to ask yourself: is it OK to be criticised against a commitment where there was a bits-and-pieces approach to Māori development?

I could go through, line by line, and itemise the little bits of funding that were given here and there. Well, this Government isn’t taking that approach. In fact, what we’re saying is that Māori development and aspiration sits alongside—

Chris Bishop: You’re just cutting it. Rubbish.

Hon NANAIA MAHUTA: —the broader programme of opportunity that this Government will deliver, because we know that there’ll be outcomes.

Now that member, Chris Bishop, won’t want to hear it. He won’t want to hear it, but he knows, like I know, that the funding that we’ll commit to youth initiatives for community-partnered projects for young people who’ve been left on the wayside will work alongside communities to innovate opportunities for young people. That can look really different. So when we’re coming into these communities and saying we want to be able to ensure that our young people aren’t left by the wayside, if it’s an opportunity to reset them back into school or into employment or into enterprise, that’s the kind of conversation we want to have. These kids aren’t done; it’s just that the current system isn’t working for them, and we want to make sure it does.

In the area of land development—because we know that regional economies are sustained by what happens within the primary production area, but, more importantly in terms of the way we want to go—how do we move from a volume-based economy to a value-based economy? For Māori, we can get that transformational shift very quickly, and the whenua fund will actually help to get that shift, alongside other things like the Provincial Growth Fund, like the billion trees initiative, and like the climate change funding that helps people progress different economic uses of land. The whenua fund can partner with that. It’s a new opportunity for Māori; it’s something we want to see grow.

Lastly, let me come back to papakāinga, in terms of the Māori development space. When people have a secure home, a home where they can bring their children up, a home that their mokopuna can be brought up in, we know that that going down, passing through the generations, there’s an opportunity not only to have a home but to go back to your whenua and create a sustainable opportunity for your whole whānau. That is the kind of focus we want to have.

Just recently, we’ve learnt from some of the projects that have been funded, and we want to continue to grow that. Papakāinga can be in our rural areas, but it could also be in our towns and our cities. We have a number of whānau who are wanting to go into this space because they know the unaffordability of homeownership could be transformed if we do more in the papakāinga space. I’m so pleased that alongside all the housing investments that this Government is making, papakāinga is a unique, bespoke kind of initiative—it will get cut-through.

This isn’t about bubble and squeak; actually, it’s about delivering. But we will judge this Budget not just by the dollars that are spent but by the way people feel about the priorities we as a Government are investing in. I think the mood is better—they call it sentiment, if you use social media kind of jargon. The sentiment is high, you know, and we’re growing our audience share, because people know this is a Budget that puts people at the heart of the transformation that we want to occur, where prosperity is shared amongst a lot more people. Just remember: when the previous Government talked about the rock star economy, only the rock stars benefited; when we talk about well-being, we want to make sure that everybody in New Zealand benefits from a change in Government, a change in sentiment—a Government that puts people at the heart of any Budget decision.

Hon RON MARK (Minister of Defence): It is a pleasure to be able to rise and take a call in support of this appropriations Budget debate on the 2018 Budget. Having listened to some of the speeches from the other side of the House and to my colleagues within the Government speaking, it draws me to reflect on something that I learnt a long time ago. It was this: one can judge people, we can judge a community, and you can judge a Government not by what they say they are going to do, not by what they say they value, and not by what they say that they believe in; you judge people by what they do.

This Budget marks a transformation, for me, from a Government that was insensitive to the plight of ordinary New Zealanders to a Government that cares about people—from a Government that believed in a “hands off the wheel”, free-market approach to governance to a Government that accepts that it has a role and a responsibility to manage the economy and to intervene, where necessary, with Government-led services, where the market would not, could not, and has not intervened, and to do so in such a way as to alleviate the plight of its people.

I heard one of my colleagues—I’m struggling to remember who it was—in a speech earlier on in this debate say that he was proud of the fact that this Government was allocating sufficient funds, money, and level of priority and urgency to addressing the housing problems—problems that the previous Government didn’t seem to believe existed—and to addressing the issues in education that would transform the lives of some New Zealanders, taking children who were learning by the courtesy light in a vehicle or a car into homes that were warm and into schools that had enough classrooms and enough teachers and enough resources to provide them with the quality of education that they fully deserve: a quality of education that will enable them to grow and develop into productive, constructive, well-qualified, employed New Zealanders.

That a Government could turn its eye away and not bring itself to acknowledge that there was a housing crisis, to not seem to want to know about the thousands of families—families whose parents were employed but who have been forced to live in cars—is actually something quite astonishing. It gives me cause to reflect on my maiden speech, which I delivered from that seat right there. I reminded the House of the words of a famous New Zealander by the name of Norm Kirk, who said, “People don’t want for much. They simply want somewhere to live, somewhere to work, someone to love, and something to hope for.”

This Government is going to deliver on all of those things.

Chris Bishop: Oh, righty-o.

Hon RON MARK: We will provide these people—Mr Bishop from the Hutt says “rubbish.” Mr Bishop: the same man who supported the Government that denied there was a housing crisis. This Government will deliver houses to those people in need. This Government will not be selling off State houses that are needed to its mates. I will raise again that this Government will not do what a National Party Government did when it sold 541 of its State houses—the entire housing stock of the Wairarapa - Tāmaki nui-ā-Rua region, the Tararua region—to Trust House Charitable Trust in Masterton, who were meant to pick up the tab of providing social and community housing and who now have the audacity to come to this Government asking for funds so that it can build more.

Well, this bunch of National Party mates who got hold of that housing stock at $20,000 a house, who made a 500 percent profit on the books overnight—if they had the business acumen that they so proudly proclaim that they have, one would have thought they would have levered against that equity and built more houses and upgraded the houses.

No, this Government will not have a bar of that sort of behaviour. This Government will not allow that sort of policy to continue. This Government has committed itself to building houses, and I’m very proud to be a part of this Government, for that one reason alone—but there is more.

In my position as a New Zealand First MP, I’m proud. I’ve heard a lot over there. I saw a lot on television over the weekend about the National Party running around, beating its gums, talking about broken promises. Well, here’s a couple: the promise to increase research and development spending, approximately a billion dollars over the next four years for a 12.5 percent research and development tax credit—promise made, promise kept; a billion dollars for the first year of the Provincial Growth Fund—promise made, promise kept; the billion trees programme—promise made, promise kept; re-establishing the Forestry Service—promise made, promise kept; a commitment to increase the number of police officers by 1,800, with $298.8 million in new operating funding for the police to do that—promise made, promise kept, Mr Ngaro; a billion dollars for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Isn’t it astonishing that the MPs who believe in free trade, who stood on this side of the House and waxed lyrical about the need to engage internationally, multilaterally, and be engaged in trade negotiations, who couldn’t pull the EU across the line—couldn’t even get them to the table—now are arguing that we don’t need diplomats, we don’t need embassies, and we don’t people working internationally, engaging with the EU, engaging in Europe, to do the very same thing.

Well, just can it—just can it, National. We don’t even believe you believe that rhetoric. We think it’s a wonderful line for the media, but, actually, even the media don’t believe that you believe what you’re saying, National. So that is a great initiative—promise made, promise kept. Funding a crackdown on migrant exploitation—promise made, promise kept; doubling the size of the Limited Service Volunteers (LSV) scheme. Remember, cast one’s mind back—Mr Ngaro says, “Oh, this is a rehash of old policy.” Well, here’s the old policy. The National Government shut down one of the three Limited Service Volunteers operations. The National Government slashed its numbers in half. The National Government—and Mr Mitchell fought tooth and nail to get his own colleagues to accept that they were wrong; unfortunately, they didn’t listen to Mr Mitchell. They did put in place the building of the new youth development unit facility at Whenuapai, which I was pleased to turn the first sod of soil on.

But this Government has put the money in to double the intake of LSVs and to re-establish Trentham’s facility so we can provide that support and care for these young New Zealanders who deserve that opportunity. I just think everyone in that Cabinet who opposed Mr Mitchell needs to hang their head in shame. But don’t worry, Mr Mitchell, we’ve done it for you, because that is actually our policy.

Look at the defence spend-up. I heard a lot of comments from that same man, Mr Mitchell, about how there were going to be defence funding cuts. Well, guess what? There are no cuts. Guess what? There’s an increase—$367 million. And by the way, just keep one’s eyes open.

Hon Mark Mitchell: We need the P-8s.

Hon RON MARK: Mr Mitchell says “Where are the P-8s?” I would ask Mr Mitchell that question. Where were the P-8A Poseidons? Where were they? There was nothing. No money allocated, no decision made—just like the frigate systems upgrade project. No decision made. He’s going to go down in history as the Minister of Defence who couldn’t make a decision about anything. On the big-ticket items that he dares now to challenge this Government on, I simply say to Mr Mitchell and to the National Party and to the RSA and to all the veterans: hold on to your seats. Hold on to your seats, because this Government means business and this Government values and appreciates its men and women, New Zealand. It understands the vulnerabilities that they face. It understands the needs of the Five Eyes partners. This Government is working hard right now, but we will not make rushed decisions that reflect the last Government’s behaviour. We will work through things. I will assure myself, Mr Mitchell, that the decisions this Government makes on equipment procurement are the right decisions, not the wrong ones like in the past.

Hon NATHAN GUY (National—Ōtaki): I’m here this afternoon to make a contribution and talk about Budget 2018. I think when we reflect back, we will all remember in the House the passion that our leader had, from this side of the House, the Hon Simon Bridges, when he addressed this Budget. He had passion, and he really pulled apart this Budget of 2018 as one of broken promises, more borrowing, and more taxes.

If we think about what we’re dealing with right now, let’s have a look at some of the facts. Really, when you analyse Budget 2017 and Budget 2018, to do with health, which has been a big focus of the debate over the last wee while in the House, and indeed out in the community, it’s pretty much like for like in health spending. Of course, what we heard the Government saying was that everything was broken in the health system and there’s going to be a massive injection in Budget 2018. Well, actually, it’s about on level-pegging.

What’s really interesting—one of these broken promises, and there’s many of them—is that Labour campaigned that there would be a reduction in GP fees and it would be universal and it would benefit about four million Kiwis. Indeed, some who are focused on health may have indeed voted for Labour in the campaign. Then what we see and now experience is it’s very targeted. It’s going to benefit about 600,000 New Zealanders—one of the broken promises.

Also, as Mr Ngaro talked in the House this afternoon, focusing on Stand Children’s Services health camps. I’ve got one, indeed, in my electorate of Ōtaki. It’s been there for a very, very long time. There’s also one in Roxburgh. So an emergency meeting was held, because they were getting no love from the Government. You would think that for a small amount of funding they would want to support these health camps in Roxburgh and in Ōtaki. So the mayors came and met—I’m not sure who it was, but it was probably the Prime Minister or the Minister concerned. When I read the public comments from my mayor, the Mayor of Kāpiti, K Gurunathan, he said it’s “a shocker for a Government that’s said to be committed to children’s welfare.” And then, the Central Otago Mayor, Tim Cadogan, said it’s a “calamity for the disadvantaged.”

And in my particular case, in my electorate of Ōtaki, Stand Children’s Services have gone and purchased a property in Paraparaumu, so I think there will be a transition and we can still look after these disadvantaged children, which is fantastic. I’m hearing that there may be a delay from when the funding dries up to when they’re able to move into the home. But, importantly, you would have thought, when you have a big-spending Government that’s focused on health, that you would want to support the most vulnerable in our community—but not so.

And then if we think about some of the things and the challenges that hard-working New Zealanders are facing right now, isn’t it amazing that petrol prices are looking like they’re going to go to $3 a litre very, very shortly. On Waiheke today, there are reports that it was $2.51 a litre, and that’s before the regional fuel taxes and the excise come on. Remember, this is a Government that said no new taxes, dancing around on the head of the pin. Fuel prices are going to jump, potentially to $3—$2.51 in Waiheke, $2.40 down in Wānaka—and it’s a massive variation, even in my electorate of Ōtaki.

It’s fascinating to see Megan Woods ganging up on the multinationals and saying, “This isn’t good enough and we’re trying to change the Commerce Commission Act to have some more powers of investigation.” Well, what is the Government doing right now, when this is going to impact on hard-working New Zealanders trying to get the kids to school, trying to get to work, trying to get to the doctor’s appointment? Are they going to scrap the excise charge that’s going to come on on 1 July? We will wait and see with bated breath, but don’t hold your breath for too long.

The cost of living is sneaking up, and, of course, hard-working New Zealanders were looking forward to National’s tax changes, which were going to benefit them to about a thousand bucks a year—that’s all gone. Business confidence is down—down by about 23 percent—and it’s no wonder, when you have changes that the Government made on oil and gas. That has sent a real chill through the business community and regional New Zealand. There are no real growth policies in this Budget, and that is a real concern for the business community—the people that help drive the New Zealand economy forward. Ultimately, their taxes mean that the Government can make choices in infrastructure and roads and schools and the like, but we’ve got R & D tax credits and no real growth proposals or policies in this Budget.

We’ve got uncertainty in regional New Zealand about immigration settings. In the campaign we heard “Oh, big cuts, we’re going to reduce it all.” And then, of course, no sooner do political parties get into office and they realise it’s quite difficult on the other side of the House. When you move around the country like I do, it’s very hard to get seasonal workers to go and pick these crops.

So there is going to be an economic slow-down; we know that. Treasury is forecasting—when National left office, over the last two years, we saw 10,000 jobs created a month; now they’re forecasting 4,000 jobs a month. This is the start of the slow-down. And while the Government and Grant Robertson have squirrelled some money away in the Budget for the next couple of Budgets, it wouldn’t take much for an economic shock to have quite a sizable impact. Then we’ve got changes through the Overseas Investment Office. That’s also had a chilling impact on investment coming in from overseas as well.

Importantly, I want to talk about the primary sector as well. This was a Budget that was fairly flat for the primary sector, pretty much raiding from Primary Growth Partnership and irrigation funding and sprinkling it back through into more trees and a few other initiatives as well. But when you think about the challenges with Mycoplasma bovis—and we’re waiting for a decision on Monday next week—it was really interesting to see that the Government didn’t choose to put a heap of money into strengthening the biosecurity system. We got it up to almost a quarter of a billion dollars in Budget 2017, when we were office—and that included $18.4 million invested into the core strengthening of the biosecurity system—and this Government, Damien O’Connor, chose to only invest $9.3 million. So that is surprising—the biggest surprise, I thought, in Budget 2018 for me.

I’ve reached out to Damien O’Connor this week to indicate that Mycoplasma bovis is very big. It’s spreading throughout the country. We should park the party politics and try and work more constructively together, because this is going to have, and it’s already had—and I don’t mind the fact that I have been, in this House and publicly, saying that the Government needs to do more. Compensation’s been too slow, and it’s good to see that the Government has now reacted and is moving faster in that space. Banks have been circling, and since I’ve been raising that, I’m hearing from farmers that they’ve had a reprieve.

But this is about supporting rural communities and farmers to get back on their feet, and the decision that is going to be made on Monday is going to be all about whether it’s long-term management or eradication. We now know, because of the spread of it, it’s going to cost more and, indeed, it is going to take longer. But this is, really, bigger than party politics, and, collectively, industry, Government, industry leaders, farmers, and politicians, in my view, need to try and work more constructively together.

So I would summarise this Budget, in the last half a minute or so, by saying it’s a very disappointing Budget. It’s all about new taxes, even though they stood in the election stump and said no new taxes. It’s all about more borrowing, and it’s all going to impact on middle New Zealand. We’re seeing that now with rising fuel prices. We see the winter energy payment, which is going to all superannuitants, is not going to occur for another couple of months. So I’d say—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! The member’s time has expired.

Hon IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety): Thank you very much, Mr Assistant Speaker. This Budget is an important part of this Government’s efforts to transform our economy from one which is low wages and low skill and low productivity into one that is more productive, that is more sustainable, and that is more inclusive.

More productive by investing in things like research and development tax credits; more productive by investing in education to make sure that young Kiwis have the skills that we need to grow more productive, higher technology, higher wage-paying business that are export-driven and that can lead us on the global stage to ensure that we are delivering real improvements for people in their lives.

More sustainable: more sustainable by investing in green technology, green businesses—our Sustainable Development Fund to invest in those businesses that will lead us through the transition to being carbon-neutral and to being more environmentally sustainable, but also more sustainable from the perspective that we need our businesses to be strong. We need to be able to compete in the global economy. We need to be able to go out there and compete against businesses from all around the rest of the world, and that means we need to have our settings in this country in a way that supports strong businesses.

And more inclusive: more inclusive in, I suppose, the obvious ways, like the Families Package that took those tax cuts that the previous Government was going to implement that were going to make every single one of us in this House better off, and actually directed that money to the people who genuinely need it—those middle and lower income families that have the costs that come with raising kids, the costs that come with soaring house prices and having to pay the bills. Those are the people who need that money far more than any single one of us, so, of course, we’re more inclusive in that fashion. But more inclusive through things like the Provincial Growth Fund, more inclusive of all different parts of the country—all the different regions in the country need to be able to participate in our economy and need to be able to feel the benefits of a growing economy, and that’s what this Budget is all about.

We are a Government that is focused on transformation, but in order to truly transform the economy, first we have to do some rebuilding. After nine years of our public services being starved, this Budget was all about rebuilding those core public services that actually allow our businesses and our communities and our people to thrive. So yes, a huge investment in health, because it’s not good enough that we’ve got hospitals literally leaking at the walls because of the under-investment of the previous nine years. I’m particularly pleased with the massive investment in education, because if our youngsters today are going to be able to participate in the economy of tomorrow, we must sort out our education system.

So Budget 2018 has seen the biggest increase in education investment in over a decade, providing a nearly 50 percent increase in new operating funding compared to National’s last Budget. The most important part of the education budget to me is the investment in early childhood education, because what I think a lot of people overlook is that those early years are just so important for building those foundations. Our investment in early childhood education and the opportunities that kids get in early childhood education actually have an enormous impact on the outcomes that they will get throughout their lives, more so than just about any other part of the education system.

Often, people kind of downplay early childhood education. They put it to one side. They say the real work happens at primary and secondary and tertiary. I disagree. The foundations are built in early childhood education, and that investment, where we’re seeing around 200,000 Kiwi kids and over 4,000 providers benefiting from the additional investment in Budget 2018 is, I think, something that this Government can be incredibly proud of.

I want to talk very briefly about my own portfolios. One of the things that I have been committed to for some time is increasing the number of labour inspectors that we have here in New Zealand. Sadly, for too long, too many employers and too many industries have been built on the back of exploitation of their workforce—in particular, the shameful exploitation of our migrant workforce.

This Budget takes the first steps. It certainly doesn’t go the whole way, but it takes the first steps, with an investment of $8.8 million to allow us to increase the number of labour inspectors, so that we can have people out there on the ground, proactively enforcing our employment law so that we don’t see more cases like Smiths City, where workers are expected to come to work and not get paid for the work that they do, and so that we don’t see more cases of migrants coming to New Zealand and having to pay their employer for the privilege of having a job. That is what that’s about. New Zealand should be a place where people are proud to work, where we take care of our workforce, and not a place that has a reputation for exploiting its migrant workforce.

Speaking of migrants, another area that we’ve put more investment into is making sure that our Immigration Service is able to look at those people who are vulnerable to exploitation and make sure that our immigration system actually works to ensure that people who are coming to New Zealand are coming for genuine job opportunities and are genuinely able to engage in our economy and make the most of their opportunity when they come here. We have had too many cases of people trafficked to New Zealand to be exploited by their employer, and the more that we can do to prevent that from happening—let alone detecting it once it has already happened—the better we can do to serve our migrant population, and the better our reputation will be on the global stage.

One area that I’m particularly proud of is the investment that ACC is making alongside the New Zealand Police and other agencies to support the survivors of sexual violence. We are establishing a lead agency to lead the Government’s work on supporting survivors of sexual violence and putting more money into the provision of support for survivors of sexual violence. This is a piece of work that parliamentary under-secretary Jan Logie has led—the idea of bringing together different agencies around that issue and making sure that the investment from across those agencies is sufficient to provide the support that those people urgently need—and is one piece of this Budget that I am very, very proud of.

Overall, what this Budget does is it builds the foundations on which we can actually achieve the transformation that we need. We need to see higher wages in this country, and that is why this Government is pursuing reform to our industrial relations framework to ensure that working people can bargain for a fairer share of a prosperous economy. It is the right thing to do, and for too long New Zealand has been an outlier. We have not followed the rest of the world in ensuring that working people do have a strong position in the workplace, that they do have strong unions, and that they are able to bargain for good terms and conditions, and that is going to change under this Government.

We are also reforming our immigration system to ensure that it provides the skills and talents that New Zealand needs. When people come to this country, they bring their skills, they bring their talents, and they should have the opportunity to use them to their fullest. But at the moment, under the previous Government’s settings, we’ve seen too many migrant workers going into low-paid, low-skill jobs and not having the outcomes that they deserve when they come and make that decision to shift their lives here to New Zealand to participate in our society, our community, and our economy. We need to ensure that our immigration settings are giving those people the best opportunities they can but also ensure that they are supporting a growing economy, a more prosperous economy, and an economy that is focused on being productive, sustainable, and inclusive.

I’m proud of what this Government has done with this Budget. We came to the last election saying that there was a lot of work that we needed to do, and we came with a programme of work that would endure through this term of Parliament. There is a lot to fix, and we were never going to fix it all with one Budget. That is a programme that is going to take at least three years, and then there will be more. But this is the first opportunity that we have had to change the settings. It is a rebuilding Budget. It is an opportunity to build the foundations for a stronger, more productive, more sustainable, and more inclusive economy where people’s lives will be better, and we are very proud of it.

GOLRIZ GHAHRAMAN (Green): My life’s work has been in the criminal justice system all over the world and also in children’s rights, so a fair and effective system of justice is, for me, of the utmost importance, and I see it as a measure of the health of any society. I was delighted that this Budget makes allowances for not just making our system of justice more fair and accessible but specifically for the youth justice sector.

Our system of justice, across the board, is in crisis. We know that. It’s failing victims. It’s failing to keep our communities safe. It has bloated our prisons to record numbers—some of those prisons being corporate ones run by Serco. It has meant that the rates of reoffending—of prisoners returning to prison—within five years are almost at 50 percent. So it is a complete and very expensive failure.

This Budget makes allowances to change that. I do want to focus on youth justice, but I also want to note, specifically, the $13.5 million for victim support services. The new family and sexual violence budget: an extra $2 million, which is an incredible win for my Green Party colleague Jan Logie. Community law centres: I was delighted that, finally, after being starved for nine years and having most of their mandate cut, they are now getting an extra $2.2 million, so ordinary Kiwis can actually access their legal rights by just walking into their community law centre and having access to quality legal services and advice. The Independent Police Conduct Authority is getting $2.7 million so that we can ensure that our police force is more accountable and is actually upholding our rights rather than breaching them.

But the Youth Court is where two of my passions in human rights collide. The Youth Court, I was delighted to see, is getting $13.4 million to lift its capacity to deal with 17-year-olds. In New Zealand, 17-year-olds are always excluded from the youth system. They’re always tried and detained as adults. The child rights sector has been working to change that since 1990, since we ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

I’ve worked with the likes of UNICEF and Action for Children and Youth Aotearoa on the last two of New Zealand’s non-governmental child rights reports to the United Nations, and I think most people would be really surprised to know that some of our most grave and persistent breaches in child rights occur in the youth justice sector. We excluded ourselves from the internationally accepted obligation to keep children in separate prisons from adult criminals. We promised to work on it, but since 1990, this is the Budget that actually does anything at all to try and comply with that standard.

We’re also in blatant breach in defining children in all sorts of ways as adults when they’re under 18. We treat children as young as 10 as being adults if they’ve been accused—just merely accused—of certain types of offending, and we don’t stop there. The 13-year-olds, 14-year-olds, and, of course, 17-year-olds are always excluded. We’ve been criticised for this on the international stage repeatedly, and it is worth noting that the Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most unanimously universally accepted of human rights documents, with the United States being the only country that has not ratified.

Now, the science says that our brains aren’t developed enough for us to have adult capacity in terms of risk assessment—a really important component to being culpable for any kind of serious crime—until we’re in our 20s. So to pretend that anyone under 18 can be held responsible for the types of really complex intent requirements of something like any serious crime—but it’s specifically for things like murder, which we do for 10-year-olds—is intentionally ignoring the science and treating kids as being responsible for things they physically cannot be responsible for, as an act of vengeance almost. You put that together with our now proven knowledge that adult prisons don’t even work to rehabilitate adults or keep our communities safe, and it makes no sense.

I came to the child rights sector through an incredible experience that I had as a young lawyer—a young baby barrister ending up on the defence team of a 14-year-old, and the most frightening sight I’ve seen in all of my years working in that system of justice was this child sitting behind an incredibly large desk at the Auckland High Court, where some of our most notorious criminals have sat. You know, as adult, trained lawyers, we had trouble communicating with him. We had trouble discerning his defence. He had suffered all sorts of what I now know are standard traumas for children who come in conflict with the law. His Child, Youth and Family file included all sorts of things, as you can imagine. He’d suffered from behavioural disorders, learning disabilities.

I now know that 92 percent of young offenders suffer from what’s described as severe learning disabilities. So they’ve been alienated from the school system, they’ve ended up in the Youth Court, and we’re treating some of them not as even being young people at all. We know that girls who come into the criminal justice system have, more often than not, suffered a very immediate trauma and they suffer from mental illness as a result of that. So this can be sexual violence, a death in the family—and we treat them as adults.

So this Budget sets aside some allowance for growing our youth justice system—for even investing in more culturally appropriate ways of dealing with our young people in our rangatahi and Pasifika courts that have been incredibly successful in bringing down the rates of reoffending for young people. So, in light of what we know, what the evidence shows, I am delighted that now the Green win—what the Green Party has campaigned for, for years and years, which is to make our justice system for young people more fair, to bring up the age of criminal responsibility and, in this case, to raise the jurisdiction age of the Youth Court.

Now, in my neighbourhood, back in Auckland, where some of our busiest courts lie, children are going to be treated as children. When they come into the criminal justice system, they will be treated fairly. The system of justice needs to be fair because it is the measure of the strength and the goodness of our value system—of any society’s value system—and now we are treating children as such, which is exciting.

If these young people, these incredibly traumatised, damaged young people, were treated in a child protection model, in a child-appropriate model, we would be taking advantage—and we will be taking advantage now, after this Budget—of a great opportunity to intervene in their lives where it has gone wrong, to make things better. And that’s good for us all.

I do want to note from an expert, and quote the Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Yury Fedotov, who said in 2011—and I think this really encapsulates the chilling context that we are operating in every time we deal with young people who’ve come into the criminal justice system. He said, “On any given day, children in conflict with the law encounter violence, including from [the] police … [from] security forces, from adult detainees … from their … peers, while some even attempt suicide. These are the invisible children; our role is to bring their misery into plain sight.” I’m proud that this Government that stands now for compassion, for evidence-based policy-making, is moving not only to support victims directly but supporting us all in actually keeping our communities safe and developing a justice system that we can all be proud of because it actually delivers justice for all. Thank you.

SARAH DOWIE (National—Invercargill): Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. Well, it may be surprising that for me, as an Opposition MP, I am delighted to take a call on this Budget, because it is a pedestrian Budget and I would like to have my right of reply to this ho-hum, very underwhelming piece of—this document that does absolutely nothing for New Zealand. In fact, I would actually go as far as to say that a leopard certainly doesn’t change its spots.

I used to think that that saying was quite harsh, back in the day when I was younger and a little bit more liberal. Obviously, I’ve got much more conservative since then. But a leopard doesn’t change its spots, certainly with respect to Labour. They’ve borrowed more—a broken promise. In election 2017, they said that they would pay down debt, and yet they’re borrowing more. In election 2017, they said, “No new taxes.”, but what are they doing? Taxing and, of course, spending—spending more but, interestingly, not in the areas that you would have traditionally thought that this Labour Government would spend in. I think it’s because when you look across at the Government, these three parties that call themselves a coalition Government—this three-headed monster, these uneasy bedmates—you’ve got the Greens on one side living in this type of utopia on clouds and riding unicorns, and then New Zealand First that think they’re some sort of champion of regional New Zealand. All we’ve seen is an assault on regional New Zealand—I’ll get to that later—and then Labour is wrangling in the middle to try and keep everybody under control. This horse-trading event of a Government—literally, because we know who’s been the winner out of the horse-trading—to get their hobby horses, their individual hobby horse projects, across the line. Again, I say we all know who won that.

So it’s been an uneasy time for the Prime Minister of late. In fact, we all know who the winner is: the Rt Hon Winston Peters. When you look across the spectrum of all of the broken promises—the promises that came out of each of these parties during election 2017—there is only one winner, and that is the Rt Hon Winston Peters. He’s very, very high maintenance.

I would say, as the Opposition spokesperson for conservation, it’s diplomats over dolphins—it’s diplomats over dolphins. You don’t want to be a dolphin swimming around the New Zealand waters; you want to be a diplomat in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. You want to be jet-setting off to Stockholm to pick the curtains and the carpets for the new chateau. How is that necessarily going to benefit New Zealanders moving forward?

But let’s talk about the Greens and their failed advocacy with respect to their vision of a green utopia. Well, it’s been underwhelming—absolutely underwhelming. Look at their first pre-Budget announcement of $80 million over four years for pest control. Well, yes, absolutely, I support pest control. We were the visionaries behind Predator Free 2050. But when you actually look at how the $80 million is going to be spent over the four years and you look at the Department of Conservation’s (DOC’s) projections, in the first year, DOC will be an estimated spend of $4.4 million. Well, in Battle for our Birds, the National-led Government committed $21 million. So the rats, possums, and stoats can thank the Rt Hon Winston Peters. They’re going to have a reprieve next year because diplomats will be jet-setting off to Stockholm to pick the curtains and the carpet for their new chateau.

So it’s been underwhelming for the Greens. They campaigned heavily on water quality. Where are the announcements with respect to water quality? They’re not there.

Hon Member: Oh, they’re not there?

SARAH DOWIE: No, they’re not there, and it’s been completely underwhelming with regards to the environment.

I also want to talk about this further investment in the Department of Conservation from the Greens announced by the Minister Eugenie Sage—an extra $1 million into policy. So we’ve had the Director-General come out at select committee and say that he’s going to be doubling the amount of policy officials in Wellington. Well, what I would say to that is what skills do those policy people have in killing rats, stoats, and possums? Not much, I would say. So where is this Government taking conservation? Where is this Green utopia? They may be spending more in policy, but what results is that going to bring on the ground?

I want to talk about New Zealand First and how they say that they’re the champions of regional New Zealand.

Mark Patterson: And we are.

SARAH DOWIE: And yes, again—winners. They have this grandiose slush fund of $1 billion per annum for regional development, yet we’re waiting to find out what the criteria is to actually get something—a project—across the line or granted. How is that party a champion of the regions when they’ve allowed places like Southland to languish? We, under our Government, had an initiative called the Southland Regional Development Strategy, and Mr Patterson knows much about this. It is languishing. We started off giving it $2.4 million in seed money, and where is the money now? Show me the money, Mr Patterson—$200,000 for some obscure feasibility study from the slush fund that had no bearing on the Southland regional strategy so far.

Mark Patterson: Well, that’ll be up to them. They’re bringing it forward.

SARAH DOWIE: So where is it? Where’s the money? Get advocating.

Mark Patterson: They’re bringing it forward, not us. They’re bringing it to us.

SARAH DOWIE: Get advocating, Mr Patterson. You’re very, very ineffectual. I want to see some money down in my region and I want to see and understand what the criteria is for that fund, because Southlanders have been abandoned.

Not only that, they’ve been abandoned with regards to the new taxes. Yes, that’s right—tax and spend. We’re already witnessing escalating fuel prices, and despite the escalating fuel prices, this Government will not relent. It is bringing two new taxes to the fore: an excise tax, upping that, and then a regional fuel tax. So an extra 25c per litre on the price tag: $15, as you fill up at the pump, per person. That is absolutely ridiculous, and we’ve already seen the spread across the regions—that regional New Zealand is picking up the tab for the rest of the country. It’s not good enough, and we are not serfs on our land.

As for a Government that says that it cares about people, where’s the investment into the Rural Health Alliance Aotearoa? Our farmers need some help at the moment. They live in the most isolated of places, and they’re experiencing some serious stress with regard to biosecurity issues. We’ve already heard from our colleague the Hon Nathan Guy, talking about a flat-line investment in the primary industries and very much a lack of attention in biosecurity. Where is the investment into Rural Health Alliance Aotearoa? That’s 600,000 New Zealanders that will no longer have support as they’re facing or watching their cows being culled, as they’re watching the Ministry for Primary Industries come in and ruin their life’s work because of an incursion that we still don’t know whether it’s going to be eradicated or if we’re managing it.

Mark Patterson: Why don’t you know? It was under your watch.

SARAH DOWIE: So, come on, Mr Patterson. Stand up for your community. You’re a list MP for New Zealand First. You’re supposed to be the champion of the regions, and yet where have you been? Where have you been, Mr Patterson?

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! Can we be careful with the use of the personal pronoun “you” so as to avoid bringing the Speaker into the debate.

SARAH DOWIE: My apologies, Mr Assistant Speaker. So—

Hon Clare Curran: Careful with the facts, too.

SARAH DOWIE: Well, it is the facts. This is the facts. This is a pedestrian Budget that has really not hit the mark.

Let’s talk about health, will we? I come from a region where we have a commissioner team in place at our district health board (DHB). Where is the extra attention to help get Southern DHB back on its feet and this broken promise of universal cheap doctors visits for our people? Not in there. Where did that go—where did that go?

Hon Clare Curran: How did it get in deficit? Under whose watch?

SARAH DOWIE: And the other thing, too, Ms Curran: where’s Dunedin Hospital? Rural Southlanders actually rely on Dunedin Hospital for a range of different services, but where’s the new hospital, Ms Curran? Where’s the new hospital?

There are a whole lot of promises made by this coalition three-headed monster, and yet none of it’s being delivered, and it’s because this is solely a horse-trading event—a horse-trading event—with no clear priorities and no understanding of what levers they’re pulling in their policies and what ramifications they will have on New Zealand. What you see now is business confidence dropping, people not investing, and people not taking on extra people with regards to jobs, and soon New Zealand will be at a standstill because there is no confidence in this three-headed monster Government.

Hon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Minister of Energy and Resources): It is an honour to rise in support of our Government’s Budget. I want to congratulate our finance Minister, Grant Robertson, on his first Budget in this role. This is a Budget that lays the foundations to transform our economy while rebuilding public services like health, like education, and like housing, that Kiwis rely on and make such a difference in our communities. We have to go through and do this rebuilding because after nine years of neglect from the previous Government, we have to rebuild those foundations.

Now, the Opposition have been floundering around, incoherent in how to respond to this Budget. It sounded a bit like an out-of-tune, tone-deaf karaoke remix of an R.E.M. song—“Oh no, they’ve spent too much; they haven’t spent enough”—because they have cannot settle on which one it is that they want to criticise us for. In one breath it’s “They’ve spent too much. Tax and spend—typical of that side of the House.” Oh, and then it’s “They’re not spending it; they haven’t spent enough.” They’ve just come out with things that are outright wrong as well in their critique of this Budget. They’ve said that we’ve cut Pharmac when it’s actually been one of the big winners of this Budget. They simply don’t know how to respond because it’s clear what a great Budget it is.

Now, the previous speaker, Ms Dowie, asked where Dunedin Hospital is. Well, it’s going to be on the corner of Great King Street and Cumberland Street. That’s where Dunedin Hospital is, and that’s why there is money in this year’s Budget to get that work under way. She asked what support there was for the Southern District Health Board. Well, good news, Ms Dowie. There is good news on the way because there is greater support for all our district health boards (DHBs) in this Budget, because we are a Government that is absolutely determined to invest in health. There’s $750 million of capital investment in there for DHBs because we simply have to rebuild a health system that has been run down by a Government that was more intent on trying to get to surplus than investing where we needed to for the good of our people and the good of our country. There’s also a $2.2 billion increase over four years for DHBs. So Ms Dowie can be very happy that that help is there.

But we, as a Government, are excited. The surplus is bigger than expected, the economic forecasts are for continued growth, and we are making major investments into things that New Zealanders tell us are important in their lives. It’s very clear that under this Government this country is going in the right direction, and it’s very clear from this Budget that Grant Robertson is going to be one of our all-time great finance Ministers. He knows how to manage the books while investing in the public services that make the big differences to people’s lives. We, as a Government, have a long-term plan to transform our economy, and it is working. We are laying the foundations for the future. We are a Government that has the courage to raise our sights beyond the three-year political cycle and think in 10-, 20-, and 30-year increments. We are thinking about our long-term future and not just the next election, which has been one of the problems that we’ve suffered under for the last nine years.

A big part of that plan is increasing our productivity and diversifying our economy, and that’s why increasing our investments in research and development was such a priority in this Budget. Under the last Government, we had low productivity and a low-wage economy. They did nothing to address that or turn that around in nine years in office. That’s why we were so thrilled last week to announce a billion dollars—a billion dollars—for a research and development tax credit. That’s a tax credit for businesses on every dollar they spend on research and development. This was the largest ever appropriation for research, science, and innovation that we’ve ever had in this country, and it is something that we celebrate.

In this Government, we know that we want to see high wages and good jobs, and we have to invest in new ideas and new ways of doing things. We are an ambitious Government that has high ambition. We want to get to carbon neutrality by 2050. We want to get to 100 percent renewable electricity by 2035. We want to address child poverty and find solutions. We know we need new ways of looking at the world and new ideas in order to do this. To do this, we simply must increase the amount of R & D we do in this country. We have an ambition as a Government to raise that to 2 percent of GDP over a 10-year period.

Now we just languish in terms of our OECD counterparts, in terms of where we sit. Currently, we spend 1.3 percent of our GDP on R & D. This puts us way below the OECD average of 2.3 percent. We simply have to do better. Nothing that was done over the previous nine years lifted those investments in R & D. In one Budget alone, we have lifted our percentage spend from 1.3 percent to 1.5 percent, and we are on track to hit 2 percent expenditure within the decade. That means that we will have more innovative businesses investing in new technology, which means they can go out and compete in the world.

With a strong economy comes the opportunity to do more to look after New Zealanders, and that’s why last week I was proud to announce that $142 million will be going into a new programme to provide heating and insulation for Kiwis in need. That is something that we celebrate.

Something that I took a lot of personal pride in is that we kept our promises to the people of Canterbury. We’ve delivered a $300 million fund, a capital accelerator, to finally get some momentum into the recovery in Christchurch. We’ve got to do it better and we’ve got to pick up the pace, and we have backed that up with investment. There was enormous optimism and excitement last year when Jacinda Ardern came to Christchurch and announced this money. She said we would be guided by what local people wanted to see, and in our very first Budget we made good on that promise. I’m excited for what this will mean for Christchurch.

In our very first months in office, we’ve also taken steps to finally address the issues that are holding Cantabrians back from moving on with their lives: addressing settling their insurance claims. There are still thousands of Cantabrians who have broken homes that have yet to have settled insurance about it. We’re not going to leave them to muddle on through with no end in sight, like they were for the previous seven years. We were proud in this Budget to announce that we are going to invest in a tribunal to make sure that we can get people over the line with their insurance claims so they can get on with their lives and have hope back in their lives.

We are also investing in putting in place an independent inquiry so that we can ensure no other community in the country ever has to go through the insurance mess that we’ve had to go through in Canterbury. That’s why we’re investing in it. So Canterbury has done well out of this Budget. This is on top of $28 million additional that we have put into youth mental health prior to this Budget, and money that we had reallocated to keep the Residential Advisory Service going.

This is a Budget that we can be proud of, not only as politicians on this side of the House but as a country. It is a Budget that sets the foundations for a clear vision of who we want to be in the future—the kind of country that we will be and have some pride in as we go through the 21st century.

It was disappointing to hear the previous speaker criticising the investment that we are making in terms of our overseas aid. She just trivialised it by saying it was money for chateaus for people to go on junkets. Well, I’d like to remind Ms Dowie that the bulk of that allocation for foreign affairs is $714 million going into aid in the Pacific. That is not something we trivialise on this side of the House. This is about us fulfilling our role as an international citizen and doing our bit. In fact, that only takes our percentage of gross national income up to 0.28 percent from where it had slipped down to 0.23 percent. So I congratulate the Minister of Foreign Affairs for the work he has done to get us to do our bit. We’ve still got a way to get to what the UN recommends, and that’s 0.7 percent. We’re still a long way from that, but at least on this side of the House, we see our international obligations—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! The member’s time has expired. I understand the next call is a split call. I call the Hon Nicky Wagner—five minutes.

Hon NICKY WAGNER (National): Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. This is a Budget of broken promises. Labour sold its soul and its pocketbook to Winston Peters, and now they can’t keep the faith with their own voters. Such poor spending choices: no universal cheaper doctors visits, those 1,800 extra cops on the never-never, no funding for school donations, and a whole heap of new taxes from this Government that promised no new taxes in its first term.

How many Labour voters voted for tax deductions for pretty horses? How many Labour voters voted for a new embassy in Stockholm? How many Labour voters voted for a political slush fund focused mostly on Northland and Shane Jones’ backyard? Labour raised expectations, promised the earth, and hasn’t delivered.

Every sector feels short-changed. The teachers say, “The Government is only putting band-aids on the problem.” The social workers say, “More could have been done to tackle urgent social challenges”. The medical students are disappointed with the broken Budget promises. The midwives say, “This is the final straw. I can’t do it any more.” The problem is that I don’t think it’s going to get better with any of the next Budgets. Significant policy changes: the suffocation of the oil and gas industry and its well-paid jobs, the cancellation of irrigation projects and the Primary Growth Fund, an increased tax burden, and, actually, the madness of increased borrowing in good times is all taking its toll. Even Treasury’s most optimistic economic forecasts are not as rosy as they were pre-election, and independent economists are even more pessimistic.

And now for an example of where this Budget hasn’t delivered: let’s consider arts, culture and heritage, a sector championed by the PM, who is hugely enthusiastic about the importance of the arts and the access for all New Zealanders. The sector had expectations that artists, arts organisations, and arts events would be promoted, would be supported, and would be funded, but they were sorely mistaken.

This Budget includes a mere 2.6 percent increase on the so-called inadequate funding of the past. Creative New Zealand, the New Zealand Film Commission, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the Royal New Zealand Ballet, and Te Matatini get zip—no increase at all. Worse than that—the very worst thing—is that such a small percentage of that measly amount of new money is actually going to artists or going to support New Zealanders to enjoy the arts. Eighty-five percent of that new funding is going towards bureaucracy and bricks and mortar, half a million dollars more—more—for ministerial servicing and $3 million more for policy advice. Labour has three Ministers in the sector, but they need more money and more people to tell them what to do. And, finally, there is $1.3 million so that they can keep their eye on the agencies that they fund.

So, in summary, less than half—a half—of 1 percent of the tiny 2.6 percent of increased funding for the arts is actually going to be spent on the arts. The Government talks the talk, raises expectation of funding for arts, but spends on bureaucracy. So for a party that promised so much for the arts, they’ve only delivered for the PSA—and no, that does not stand for “poor, struggling artists.” Thank you.

SIMON O’CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): I’m actually disappointed, in many ways, to have to take a call, and I’m sure the members opposite are disappointed as well. I’m disappointed to have to take a call on an incredibly disappointing Budget—an absolute flop. In fact, my colleague Nicky Wagner, who has just sat down, has articulated some of the many problems.

Really, it’s that classic case of a new Government, a Hydra of three groups who have talked large but delivered little. In fact, I would suggest that this Budget is part of an economic vandalism. We heard in the previous speaker’s contribution and those of my colleagues that everything from what’s happened around the oil and gas through to irrigation—this is a Budget and a Government out of its depth, who do not understand what they are doing, and it’s reflected in the decisions that they’ve come up with. I’d suggest, too, it’s a classic Labour Budget with the added bonus of New Zealand First in the background, pulling the strings—and I’m looking forward to the next New Zealand First speaker.

Look, it’s a classic Labour Budget in so far as they’re spending more but achieving less. A good example of that is in housing—social housing, in particular. It’s one of the three portfolios that I hold. They’re delivering fewer social houses than National had promised and committed to building. Before we, sadly, sadly, lost the Treasury benches, we’d committed to 6,000 new social houses, or now Labour likes to call them public houses. What did Minister Twyford come out with? It was 4,800. I’m no mathematician, but that’s 1,200 short of what National was delivering. There is huge talk—huge talk—from the other side about what they’re achieving, and that was on the back of a social policy announcement of an extra $100 million from Labour, which was a third of what National had also committed. Again, they’re spending more in some areas and getting less, or, in other cases like that social spending, claiming to do more when in fact doing less.

Look, I think of my own electorate in Tāmaki. One of the announcements somewhat hidden in the Budget documents was an extra $300 million to the Tāmaki Regeneration Company. Now look, those guys do an amazing job in my area in the likes of Glen Innes, but they’d promised, effectively, more money to build another 2,100 homes. Where, Minister, are those homes going to go? We’re already putting 7,500 new homes into that area across Glen Innes and Panmure—a great project—but they’re already packed in. They’re already being squeezed in, and yet the Government—in desperation, I would suggest, to be seen to be doing more—has announced 2,100 more homes into the Tāmaki area. I put my question again to the Minister and those who prepared the Budget: where are those houses going to go? I don’t want, and the people of Glen Innes don’t want, that community to be returned back to sort of tenement living or a slum. They’re proud of that community, they love that community, I love representing that community, and they don’t want over 10,000 homes crammed in. It’s just not appropriate.

Turning to a couple of other elements, actually, in the local area, constituents are, rightly, up in arms about the continued taxes from this Government. They were promised none but they’re delivering more than I can put on one hand at the moment. The fuel tax that’s been highlighted by my colleagues—what’s that going to cost? The increases of the minimum wage; the threats, effectively, around the regulatory changes, including those of labour relation laws—that is part of that economic vandalism. That’s what’s putting small businesses under pressure, and the best answer we get from the Ministers on the other side is they have to suck it up. Well, that’s just, again, typical Labour thinking. It’s actually those hard-working families, mum and dads, day after day, often those running the small businesses—getting less money, I might add, than those employees in their businesses—who are being told, “Suck it up. You’re just going to have to take what the Government throws at you.” Not to mention—not to mention—a big shout out to Alwyn Poole and his team at the Villa Education Trust. They do a fantastic job for our children, and yet the Government, effectively, continue to attack and bully them.

I will throw one positive, though, and it is in the arts spend. I am personally pleased to see the Pathways to Arts and Cultural Employment programme back—and a bit of a shout out to Lynn and Linda at the Depot Artspace; I know you guys do a fantastic job. I’m pleased to see that returned.

But turning back to the negative—because there are so many—speaking as the chair of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee, in the military space, where are the new P-8A Poseidons? These are aircraft which are absolutely needed by our Defence Force, which this Government was prepared to back. We need to see this Government and this Budget deliver those—not to even mention the replacements for the C130s.

There are a huge number of elements which this side—or, rather, the other side, the Government’s side—needs to answer. Thank you very much, Madam Assistant Speaker.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): I understand this is a split call. Mark Patterson—five minutes.

MARK PATTERSON (NZ First): Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. I’d just like to start by congratulating Grant Robertson on bringing down an outstanding Budget document. I am proud to be part of a team that has pulled this together—this Labour - New Zealand First coalition Government, with a little help from our friends down at the Greens.

I note the Minister has a similar Scottish Presbyterian southern heritage to myself, as does David Clark, and Shane Jones, of course, is the other Associate Minister—probably slightly more flamboyant than we are—but you can see those values come through in this Budget. This is a Budget with a heart, and it seeks to address a lot of social inequity that has been building up—major spending in health, housing, and education—but it’s also a prudent Budget, a balanced Budget, and, in keeping with those stoic southern prudent values, keeping Budget spending to 28 percent of GDP. That was actually lower than the previous Government.

So that’s the reason why the Opposition has been taking air swings at this Budget, because there’s just nothing there to swing at. The old “tax and spend” clichés, the “broken promises” clichés—they’re all empty statements, especially in light of the glowing endorsements from the likes of Business New Zealand and Export New Zealand.

There is one thing the Opposition were right on—there is one thing they were right on: this has been a good Budget for New Zealand First. We have delivered some really sound, sensible, far-reaching policies—

Hon Member: Not for New Zealanders.

MARK PATTERSON: —for New Zealanders—absolutely for New Zealanders—and I will start with our flagship $1 billion Provincial Growth Fund. I note Ms Dowie was mocking that, but this is the first time—and Minister Robertson mentioned it in his Budget address: that this, in our lifetime, is the biggest injection of funding into provincial New Zealand.

In reply to Ms Dowie, the mayors are lining up all up and down the country. They have got a backlog of infrastructure that, for the first time, they have got a hope of getting over the line for their communities, because there is some funding allocated. It hasn’t all been delivered yet; that is because there is a prudent process to go through.

This is also a nation-building project. The 1 billion trees—this is us taking responsibility for our international commitments, not buying shonky offshore carbon credits. The return of the Forestry Service to Rotorua, back to the regions, and the 1,800 extra police—and just the other day, there’s a policeman now in Clinton for the first time in a decade. So the drugs that go on there, the delinquent crime, and the stock rustling—there is now someone there, and that is part of what we will see rolled out with this $300 million boost to the police force in our rural communities.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT)—again, another spend that the Opposition have picked up on. What they don’t understand within this is the trade element as well. It’s not only just keeping our international obligations and being a good international citizen but there’s the trade thing, and wasn’t it great news today to hear Minister Parker and Prime Minister Ardern announce the beginning of our EU free-trade negotiation? We will now have the capacity to carry that out. As Minister Woods said, the Achilles heel of this economy, and the reason, when I look out my window in Bowen House, that I see unprocessed, raw logs heading off to Asia, is that we have not spent on R & D—the 1.3 percent, compared to the 2.6 percent OECD average. And it’s worse than that, because the public sector spend is actually pretty competitive with the OECD average. It’s the private sector that is languishing well behind, at only 40 percent of the spend of other international corporates. So we are lagging well behind.

This Budget will unleash innovation and development. It will be businesses, not bureaucrats, deciding where the corporate R & D is spent. They will not have to come to Wellington and beg to Callaghan Innovation or the Primary Growth Partnership, and it won’t be political connections that get you that R & D spending. It’ll be on your own merits, making your own case.

So there is much to be lauded in this Budget. This is a major shift. It’s far-sighted. It’s visionary. It’s starting the process of turning round what was the very narrow, focus group - driven Government that we’ve had that’s seen so many imbalances—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): I apologise to the member. You time has expired.

Hon EUGENIE SAGE (Minister of Conservation): Tēnā koe, Madam Assistant Speaker. I’m proud to be part of a Government that’s delivered a Budget that’s all about a sustainable economy, a healthy environment, and a fairer society. It’s a Budget that’s all about having a heart and caring about New Zealanders, and, like others, I congratulate our very capable Minister of Finance, Grant Robertson. This Budget is all about rebuilding our economy, rebuilding the public sector, and laying the foundations for a much fairer future and an economy that moves to be zero carbon by 2050. It’s a responsible Budget. It’s stuck within the Budget responsibility rules that the Labour Party and the Green Party committed to. It is delivering on the promises in our confidence and supply agreement and in New Zealand First’s coalition agreement.

It is a Budget that is about making it better for New Zealanders, and we see that in the health sector—the major investment in public health—with an extra $3.2 billion over the next four years. It’s about making it easier for kids to go to the doctor, with under-14-year-olds having free access to their GPs. An extra 56,000 young New Zealanders will be able to get free doctors visits because of this Budget, and another 540,000 New Zealanders will get cheaper visits to their doctor with the extension of the community services card access to everybody holding that card and to all Housing New Zealand tenants and to everybody who pays a rent subsidy and gets an accommodation supplement. That’s what this means. It is a Budget with heart, a Budget that cares about New Zealanders.

In education, the increased investment there will see hundreds of new classrooms—a major investment in new schools—and 1,500 new teachers to reduce the teacher-pupil ratio. Again, it is rebuilding our public services so that they can provide to New Zealanders’ needs.

But it’s also in housing, because this Government believes that every New Zealander needs a secure, warm, dry, and affordable home. That’s why I’m proud to be part of a Government that with the Warmer Kiwi Homes fund that Minister Megan Woods has announced, has an extra $143 million for heating and insulation grants over the next four years for homeowners on lower incomes, because we’ve got a major problem which the former Government neglected, with its slashes to the Warm Up New Zealand: Healthy Homes programme. There are 800,000 homes in New Zealand going into this winter which are not insulated at all or are under-insulated. So the Warmer Kiwi Homes project—that extra $143 million—is a major step towards doing better and providing people with warm, dry homes.

We’ve seen the work that Minister Phil Twyford is leading, with huge energy and drive, to actually getting major changes across housing and making it better for renters, because under National, homeownership has become a dream for so many New Zealanders. It’s at an all-time low—a 60-year low. Half of New Zealanders are now renting. Renting is no longer just a short-term option before people buy their own home. We’ve got a commitment now in this Budget to do more with the Residential Tenancies Act to make sure that renters can have secure accommodation. We have the end to the sell-off of our State houses and the increased investment in public housing, with an extra 6,000 new public houses promised over four years.

Not only is Budget 2018 about ensuring that New Zealanders have good housing but it’s ensuring that the places that our native species live—our kākāpō, our kiwi, our whio—are better too, through a major investment in conservation. There is an extra $180 million in conservation funding over the next four years, which is the biggest increase in decades, and a key part of that—$81 million—is going to sustained predator control, making sure that our native species, our taonga species, are safe in the places they live from depredation by rats, stoats, and possums.

This is a Budget that has meaning. It’s about people and planet and about laying the foundations for a healthy environment, a sustainable economy, and a much fairer society. I’m proud to be in a Government that cares about Kiwis.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): I understand this is a split call.

JO HAYES (National): Kei hea Whānau Ora—where is Whānau Ora? Kei te ngaro, kei te ngaro, kei te ngaro—it is missing, it is missing, and it is missing, and that’s not good enough.

It’s not good enough that the Government Māori Ministers did not fight at the Budget table for funding for Whānau Ora, even though in the manifesto leading up to them becoming Government, there was a $20 million promise over four years that was put in as a promise to those delivering Whānau Ora. How disappointed they all are. When the very founder of Whānau Ora, the Hon Dame Tariana Turia, comes out and says that she is disappointed—disappointed—in this Government for not funding Whānau Ora, it says a lot. It says a lot. It says a lot that she has had to come out and say something like that, and I am sure that being disappointed actually weighed more heavily in her thoughts, rather than what came out of her mouth.

We talk about the broken promises in the House. They are broken promises that this Government made to Māori—big broken promises. The reduction in Māori development funding is a disgrace. It’s an absolute disgrace, and it seems to be the mantra of a Labour-led Government that Māori suffer, even though it was Māori that actually gave their support through the Māori electorates for all those seats to go to Labour. How disappointed and how regretful they all must be over this terrible Budget that this Labour Government has given to this country.

I want to quote what the Chair of Te Pou Matakana, Merepeka Raukawa-Tait, said about the Budget. She said, “It’s a broken promise. It’s a kick in the guts to Māori.” That’s absolutely terrible that our leaders are standing up and saying that.

When the Minister for Whānau Ora stood up yesterday and spoke in this House and said there were whānau from Whānau Ora that supported this Budget, I don’t know who he was referring to, because the groups that I’ve been talking to—the commissioning agencies and the whānau—are very disappointed. They’ve lost faith in this Government. They’re not going anywhere. When the Minister for Whānau Ora stood up at the Blenheim Whānau Ora symposium and said, “Whānau Ora isn’t going anywhere.”, boy, did he mean it. It’s gone absolutely nowhere, because there’s no support from this Government for Whānau Ora.

I’ll keep harping on about it and harping on because this Government is responsible to all the peoples of this country. By putting the funding and spreading it across into mainstream funding, how will there be accountability measures that whānau will actually gain the services and get access to those services? I’ve worked in this industry. I know that it is really difficult to actually get those pure numbers out of those providers, out of the large providers. I know that Whānau Ora providers can deliver, and they do deliver. They bring people in that are the hardest—those with the highest needs for health and education—and they get them to their services. Their Whānau Ora plans are built like that, and yet this Government gives them nothing—absolutely nothing. It is disgraceful—very, very disgraceful.

And Māori education suffered as well. There were many broken promises around that, as well. Te Kotahitanga, the Māori teacher training programme—they promised to fund that, but that never went anywhere. Nobody will get anything from Te Kotahitanga. They’re building more schools, they’re fixing up schools, they’re bringing in extra teachers, and they’ve got a big budget for Te Reo Māori, but if there’s no learning and education for teachers to teach Te Reo Māori, then it just seems to be a waste of time.

I just want to end my contribution by quoting a message that I got from a principal of a kura kaupapa Māori tuarua. He says, “Money is an opportunity for education, but will be spent on existing structures of teacher training and schools that will invariably perpetuate the status quo of Māori failure.” Listen to what that principal has to say, Government—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Order! I apologise to the member.

IAN McKELVIE (National—Rangitīkei): Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. I support some of the comments the previous speaker, Jo Hayes, made about Whānau Ora. It is a great programme when it’s applied correctly, and does really well.

The Budget was disappointing for me not because of what it said but because of what it didn’t say. It did virtually nothing, in my view, to support the continued growth of our economy or GDP. Interestingly, the Government spent a lot of time in the last nine years harping on about our lack of GDP progress. They’ve done nothing in this Budget, in my view, to stimulate that. I’m not saying it’s necessary to do so, either, because by world standards we’re actually in a pretty good space there. You see, if we grow the economic pie everyone gets the benefit of this, and to achieve this the Government needs to continue to ensure the correct settings are in place to allow businesses to flourish and grow.

As for it being transformational or aspirational, well, I’ll go to the pictures. This was a Budget with so much opportunity. There was more cash around than at any time in New Zealand’s history for a Budget. What did they do? I think they blew it, with the same old policies that Labour Governments are famous for: Government services and bureaucracy.

I want to touch on the free tertiary education bit for a moment. I was the recipient of a free tertiary education, and I can’t dispute the value of that, although in my case it did no good at all. But none the less, it seems strange to me that we’re providing for free tertiary education at a time when our universities and institutions are struggling to maintain their place in the world. I think it’s essential that we also ensure that those institutions have that opportunity to sustain their place in the world. Interestingly, the numbers are significantly down. The reason the numbers are down is pretty obvious: people can get jobs. Even in my day, young people, if they could get a job, would go straight to the job, because they’d earn money. It’s exciting to get out of school and earn money. I think they’ll come back to education one day if they need it. That’s their option.

That party had nine long years to plan this Budget, and I think the result merely proves that, with one or two exceptions, they did nothing in that time. I can assure the House that the National Opposition will not be sitting on our hands during the next two years, and come Budget 2021 the country will reap the benefit of that hard work.

I want to spend a moment or so on fisheries, where it would appear the Budget signals some change and what I might call a greening of the Budget. I don’t have an issue with that, but there’s really little other change in the fishing area, other than a slight increase in the amount of money available for administration. Certainly, there seems to be a new line in the Budget headed “Grants and Programmes”, and that could well be beneficial to the fishing industry, as well.

Moving on to my other area—I was going to say “of expertise”, but given my punting record, it’s not—of racing, a small amount of tax relief has been introduced to try to encourage New Zealanders to invest in the breeding industry. If it works, it will add some value. It will be interesting to see what happens when the good-looking colt, however, becomes a good-looking gelding. That’s, no doubt, work that’s going to have to be done by the IRD. It’s, at the same time, disappointing, I think, to see the race fields legislation held up or parked, and no Budget line to pick up the recommendations that come out of the Messara report, which I also think is positive for the industry. It will be interesting to see where that gets to, as well.

I want to briefly touch on R & D tax credits. The sum of $1 billion is set aside in the Budget, and I hope this is picked up by industry, but, of course, one has to remember you’ve got to have the income or a great capital base to invest in R & D. Given that the Government are looking at stifling foreign investment in New Zealand, using such tools as the Overseas Investment Amendment Bill, which could well see a significant dent in the $3 billion of overseas investment that came into the country last year, it may well be challenging for companies to pick up those tax credits. I hope they can. It will be good if they do. I’ve got my serious doubts they will.

I wanted to touch for a minute on, I think, the elephant in the room for New Zealand, and certainly for New Zealand farmers and the Government, and that’s Mycoplasma bovis. One’s got to feel sorry for the farmers involved in this. Certainly one’s got to feel sorry for the Ministry for Primary Industries staff involved in this, because whilst we think there’s stress on farmers, there’s certainly stress on those staff that have got to deal with this issue, as well. It’s a serious challenge for the country. It’s a very unfortunate outbreak, and I think that we’ve got to remember it’s nothing like foot-and-mouth. Foot-and-mouth’s a very clear—there are world policies on it. It’s very clear what happens in the case of a foot-and-mouth outbreak. In the case of this, there are a lot of unknowns, and I think it’s very difficult for all involved. I just hope that when the decision’s made on Monday it’s the right decision for all New Zealanders. I think it will be challenging, but no doubt we’ll get to the right space on it.

So that’s my brief contribution to this year’s Budget debate, and I will sit down now.

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Minister of Agriculture): Thank you very much, Madam Assistant Speaker, and indeed it’s a great honour to be part of the Government delivering the first Budget that we’ve had after nine years—nine long years—absent from the Treasury benches. It’s nice to be back and to be in a position to make a positive contribution to New Zealand. If there are words that can sum up the Budget, I guess they are “positive”, “reassuring”—there were people who were scaremongering about what might or might not happen—“clear”, and “consistent”. And I think that is brilliant. You know, that’s the best we can do.

I have to say, I did go to a local magazine—not known for its Labour Party support, I have to say—Farmers Weekly: “Budget gets tick”. Now, I’m sure that would have horrified the previous speaker, Ian McKelvie, when he received that in his rural mailbox, but actually I thought that was good, because traditionally, I guess, the rural sector hasn’t been kind to Labour. They’ve been quite critical, but there was an admission that actually it was a clear, consistent, and fair Budget. I think I can quote many here: “the primary sector has harvested some gains in the Coalition Government’s first Budget with science, research and forestry the biggest winners.”—not the only winners, but certainly the biggest. We were unashamedly focused on health, education, and housing, because we believe more than anything else that every single New Zealander, regardless of where they’re born, who their parents are, and what their social circumstances are, is entitled to an opportunity to realise their talents and to get on and have a decent life. We’ve got to sort out health, we’ve got to sort out education, and we’ve got to give these people a home to live in. So the vast majority of money has, rightfully, gone into those areas, but that hasn’t meant to say that’s the only place.

Can I say that from a rural perspective, again, I would like to quote some of the people in here. I think consistency and clarity are really, really important, because, as I say, what industry and what business need is certainty, and that’s what we offered them, and that’s why this farming magazine came out and gave it a tick. Indeed, one of the senior economists across the country, Con Williams from the ANZ, said the Budget “did not contain any significant surprises”, and that’s a tick—that’s a positive. He went on to say, of course, that the Green Investment Fund and the tax credits for R & D are all positive things that will see us move into a better future.

There were many other things, and if I can just take the time, I guess, to move on to the main areas of primary industries and agriculture, we did put extra funding into biosecurity. The Opposition spokesperson said it was a paltry sum. Look, indeed, it was not as much as I would have liked. But, as has been pointed out by the previous speaker, Ian McKelvie, we have a big challenge ahead of us—Mycoplasma bovis—and this Government is committed to do whatever it takes to try and eradicate, if possible, or certainly manage over the long term the downward infection rates across this country. We’re really focused on that and working positively with industry towards a decision early next week, which will give more certainty.

The $9.3 million extra for biosecurity will assist. We have split up the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI). We have a business unit that is focused—900-plus people—solely on biosecurity, and I don’t think there’d be anyone in the country now, given the exposure of Mycoplasma bovis and what its possible effects on agriculture mean—there would not be one person who would not appreciate biosecurity and its importance to us. This is one of many, many threats to our economy, to the farming sector, to our indigenous flora and fauna, and we’ve got to put more money in, as we have; put more focus in, as we have; and be more effective, as we will.

We then went on, of course, and in the Budget gave $38 million more to MPI because they had been starved of funding for too long. They are under real pressure, and that is catch up. I would have liked to have put more in, but the $30 million indeed takes some pressure off what is, I believe, the most important area of our economy. That is an agency that helps with the generation of export revenue across the board, across a number of sectors. That $38 million will be welcome.

We also committed $5 million to OVERSEER. OVERSEER is a program that was launched by the previous Labour Government, actually, as a nutrient-management tool, a fertiliser tool for farmers. It’s evolved into a tool for regional councils to try and measure the impact on the environment of, mainly, farming practices, and it’s been kind of almost out of scope. It hasn’t had the money needed through research to upgrade it, to validate it, to make it more effective, and to, I guess, offer more trust—or have farmers trust it more as they move into a new world where this Government is asking farmers and, indeed, urban dwellers in this country to improve our practices so that we have better-quality water. Who could argue with that objective?

Getting there is a challenge. The use of OVERSEER is one way that farmers can improve their practices and know that what they do gives good effect to reducing nutrient outflow. So we’ve put more money into the validation and the upgrading and operating of that tool so farmers can trust it, regional councils can trust it, and, indeed, New Zealanders will have better waterways as a result. I welcome that commitment from my colleague the Minister of Finance, and the approval of my ministerial and Cabinet colleagues to fund that.

We also put $15 million more into the Sustainable Farming Fund—again, another smart initiative of the former Labour Government that’s been carried through by the National Government, and I’m grateful for that. It is a very good fund that focuses on smaller projects that have commitment from the community and from the farming sectors. It has proven, time and time again, to deliver positive outcomes.

If I can quote Warwick Catto from Ballance Agri-Nutrients—Balance is a fertiliser company—he said, “That fund has pretty much been flatlining for the past few years so this will be [a] positive [contribution].” He said that “… cleaning up catchments like Taupo and Rotorua is proving very expensive at hundreds of dollars per kg of nitrogen. The [Sustainable Farming Fund] is a far better way to go to help drive behaviour change based on research rather than bear the expense of trying to clean up catchments afterwards.” This was a positive endorsement from a major player in the fertiliser sector, knowing full well that putting the money upfront into science to assist farmers to improve their behaviour is the way forward for us.

The Budget also contains significant money for forestry, through the Provincial Growth Fund. My good colleague Shane Jones and our coalition partners, we’re committed to grow more trees—a billion more trees in this country—

Hon Ruth Dyson: How many?

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: —and I applaud him. A billion more trees. I can say it will be the right tree in the right place.

Matt King: Who’s going to plant them?

Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR: The member for Northland there knows that this is a very, very positive initiative, as much as he might, I guess, regret the fact that we’re doing it and he’s not able to. And $245 million over ten years for this is a significant commitment from this Government to create a greener economy, to reduce the sediment and the nutrients in our waterways, to offer job opportunities through the regions of New Zealand.

This has been a very, very positive Budget that has been accepted across the primary sectors. A big tick—[Holds up Farmers Weekly]—you won’t see that often on the front of this newspaper. I applaud the editor. I thank him. I’ve not always done that; I’ve been known to criticise him. But that’s a very big ask, and the former Minister of Agriculture sitting over there, David Carter, knows that’s a really big ask. That shows that the Budget has been accepted. It’s one of consistency—no surprises.

The wider public out there, including people in the rural sector, know that we are committed to a fairer New Zealand, know that we’re committed to sharing the benefits of trade—sharing the benefits of the rural sector right across our economy, not just seeing those benefits accrue to the 1 percent at the top and have growing unrest from people who can’t afford to pay their bills. We want a New Zealand that is a fair place to live, that offers inspiration and opportunity to everyone. This Budget is positive, it’s reassuring for people regardless of where they are in our economy, it’s clear, it’s consistent, and it’s offered the kinds of opportunities and inspiration and support that will give New Zealanders a fair go—and it’s about time. We’ve been waiting nine long years and we have delivered. Kia ora.

Dr JIAN YANG (National): This Government is not an ambitious Government at all. Now, this is such a disappointing Budget—it’s widely regarded as a disappointing Budget—yet they are very pleased with the Budget. The Prime Minister warned before Budget day, time and time again, that this would be a very boring Budget, and it turned out it is indeed a very boring Budget. It is also a very disappointing Budget. This Budget has no great or new ideas. Have a look at these current and past policy initiatives for Vote Statistics. The current Government has only one—one policy initiative. The previous Government had seven—seven new policy initiatives. This is a good reflection of the Budget as a whole, because we cannot see the solutions despite the fact that the Labour - New Zealand First Government has been talking about crises day after day. In the end, they can’t come up with any good solutions.

This is not surprising. In the past seven months, this Government has not been able to come up with enough of their own bills, and rely on the previous National Government’s bills to prolong debate time. So this is the Government without good ideas, and sometimes I feel sorry for the Government because it is so hard for them to come up with good ideas. They talk about these crises, day after day. They are very good at alarming New Zealanders with these fictional crises. In the end, sometimes they are carried away by these fictional crises and make big promises, but later on they find they can’t deliver—they simply cannot deliver. That is why this Budget is littered with broken promises.

International education, for example, contributes $4.5 billion to our economy—the fourth-largest export earner in New Zealand. They promised to, basically, destroy the industry because they wanted to cut immigration numbers by 20,000 to 30,000 each year to help resolve the housing crisis. Now what they are doing—they’re doing nothing, because they can’t deliver. They have to break their promise because they realised that that industry, international education, is so important, and they can’t really simply cut the number by 20,000 or 30,000.

Another example is KiwiBuild, one of the trump cards of the Government. Basically, they’re saying that in 10 years, 100,000 houses—in the end, it is quickly becoming a laughing stock. Remember that Chinese-sounding names fiasco? It is still fresh to the Chinese community, but now this Government’s trying to ask the Chinese community to help, because they need the assistance of Chinese developers. The problem is KiwiBuild is so fundamentally flawed that no one can save it.

We come to the fact that they’ve been talking about a crisis, talking about spending, but have no plan to earn more for the country. However, they’re very good at taxing people. We understand they have the fuel taxes, but there is one more tax that people have not really paid attention to, and that is the border tax. All international travellers will have to pay about $22 going to and from New Zealand—$22. This is a border tax, although they don’t call it a tax. They call it a biosecurity and customs levy.

But the tourism industry has seen through it, and, basically, says this is a new tax. The tourism industry has been so important to us, creating thousands and thousands of jobs. Basically, over 8 percent of total employment is in the tourism industry, contributing billions and billions of dollars—I understand it is about $15 billion each year, or 21 percent of our total export earnings—yet the Government is going to introduce a new tax, and at the same time they’re going to cut the budget for Tourism New Zealand by $6 million. So the tourism industry is already under pressure because of the quick rise of the minimum wage. And now, the Labour - New Zealand First Government is trying to destroy this top earner of foreign exchange.

MATT KING (National—Northland): What’s the saying? Underpromise; overdeliver. Isn’t that the saying? This coalition Government obviously didn’t get that memo. Let’s see: they said they were going to plant a billion trees—not them and the private sector. They said they were going to build 100,000 houses—not them and the private sector. Solve child poverty; houses for everyone, they said; cure cancer—nah, they’ll save that for the next election. It’s a Government full of ideology, but out of touch with reality.

Let’s take the billion-dollar regional development fund. Let’s be honest here. New Zealand First had Labour over a barrel. What choice did they have? It’s that, or 12 years in Opposition. The last time that happened, it was 1969. Sir Keith Holyoake and that great National Government did it to Labour back then.

So big-value wins for New Zealand First—over $5 billion and counting. So what did the poor old Greens get, with one less MP? Less than 10c in the dollar, compared to New Zealand First—that’s what they got. Do you think this country voted for this? I don’t think they did, in a million years. Did they vote for this shambles? I don’t think so.

Hon Member: It’s MMP.

MATT KING: You can call it the way you like, but “Mr Seven Percent” is calling the shots.

Now let’s talk about Shane Jones and his $3 billion cheque book, to win a seat in 2020. Let’s be honest. For his political survival, they need that seat. I’m picking it’ll be Northland. Shane Jones lives walking distance from the Kerikeri airport. Well, hello! Kerikeri gets a brand new airport terminal with millions of dollars from this New Zealand slush fund pumped in. About three kilometres in the other direction there’s a roundabout, which gets $9 million from the Shane Jones fund. About 20 minutes away are Paihia and Russell wharves—some more money from that slush fund. And 20 minutes south, Kawakawa gets $2.3 million for the Kawakawa development centre. I’m putting my Northland hat on here, my Northland MP’s hat, and I say to Shane Jones, “Keep spending that money in Northland; the more the merrier. Keep spending it.”

But what about the rest of New Zealand? It’s not the money they’re spending from the slush fund that I have a problem with. It’s the process they have, or rather, the lack of it. It’s the way they got the money. That, I have a problem with. But what gets me is the Northland motorway. They’ve gutted it—the single biggest driver of economic growth in Northland. Universal support by all the business community and local and regional government. They gutted it. They took $5 billion out of the regional roading budget—that’s $5,000 million—and they tried to spin that putting $200 million, or less than $200 million, back was fair. Big fail. The motorway length in 2019, from Whangarei to Northport, the busiest road and the heaviest use of motor vehicles in Northland, meets all the cost-benefit ratios.

But what did we get in return? Have a guess. Another roundabout on the outskirts of Whangarei—a roundabout that was going to be built as part of that motorway project. We’re getting stiffed by this Government at every turn. The broken promises are endless. Where are the $10 GP visits? Not happening. The 1,800 new cops in three years? It turns out to be 900 and maybe five years. The 10,000 houses built per year for 10 years. We’re getting a thousand this year, if we’re lucky. Immigration—down 30,000; it’s about 3,000 less. They’ve pledged 100 million trees a year, which equates to 274,000 trees a day, 11,400 trees per hour, 190 trees a minute, and three trees a second. So for the last eight months they’ve planted six trees. That’s two seconds’ worth of planting. Good luck with the billion trees.

No new taxes? We’ve got four of them. They said they’re going to pay down debt. It turns out they’re going to borrow another $10 billion. That is $10,000 million. This Government is riding a strong economic wave. This is the time they should be paying their debt down. It’s a wave that hard-working New Zealanders and a hard-working National Government built. It seems a shame to see all that hard work crushed by this shambolic, incompetent Government. Roll on 2020, or sooner.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): I understand the next call is a split call—Angie Warren-Clark.

ANGIE WARREN-CLARK (Labour): Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. I am delighted to stand and speak to Budget 2018. It’s obviously my first Budget, and I feel very grateful to our coalition Government and the Hon Grant Robertson for the creation of such a fiscally and socially responsible Budget.

There is so much need—right? So much work we have to do to fix nine years of neglect: rebuilding critical public services, taking action on child poverty, promoting economic development and supporting the regions, enhancing and protecting our natural resources, and enriching New Zealand’s culture and identity. We’ve done it all in this Budget. Sure, we haven’t had enough, because we’ve had to fix up the mess left over. But we are on track. This is a foundation Budget. This is the Budget where we start again and we get it right, from scratch.

So it’s been nine years for those of us—as I say, I’m only new to this House. So, for me, I have lived, raised children, worked, and supported the community that has suffered, under nine years of neglect. We know how hard these things are. We are winning in many of the worst categories in the OECD. What does that say about our little piece of paradise? What does it say?

We’ve gone back to our core values in this Budget—universal education—and we’re working towards ensuring this happens. Our Government has invested $12.26 billion into education. Education, however, sits within the context of our lives. It’s not a silo, where we focus on just learning. We are now looking more deeply into the areas where our families’ broader social context is taken into account. A hungry child does not learn well. Our Families Package helps that. A child living with violence at home cannot concentrate and be open to learning. There’s $76 million towards front-line services, to support our families.

A police increase—and I see that Matt King has left the House—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Order! You cannot refer to a member who’s not present in the House.

ANGIE WARREN-CLARK: Sorry; OK. I see a former member has left the House—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): No, that’s not right either.

ANGIE WARREN-CLARK: Great. I see today that every four minutes in this country, the police respond to a domestic violence call out—every four minutes. We are working to fix that.

A child sleeping in a car or living in a transient homeless situation will struggle to reach their full potential. A child living in a cold, damp home will be absent due to illness, and they miss out too. Our Budget addresses these factors, and our coalition Government is working collaboratively, and the Cabinet table is working collaboratively, to lift our families. Every child benefits by our investment in education.

I’d just like to mention the ORS, which is the ongoing resourcing scheme in education: $133.5 million for a thousand extra students for vital support—helping young Kiwis reach their potential by getting $21.5 million to ensure early intervention is available for up to 8,000 children. And I’d also like to mention our very hard-working and longstanding teacher aides out there, who are actually doing it hard and are getting some support now to do this work.

Education is about a solution for us all: educate a child, educate a village. Thank you.

VIRGINIA ANDERSEN (Labour): Thank you for the opportunity, and I recall the words of the Minister of Finance on Budget day: “He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.” This is a Budget about building foundations, about health, about housing, and about education, which I would like to speak about today.

I am proud and so happy to see that support staff and special education, under ongoing resourcing scheme funding, will be receiving $21.5 million of extra funding to enable early intervention and to enable parents, teachers, and students to identify learning difficulties as early as possible so that we give our kids the best start in life. I’m also heartened to see a 45 percent increase in the education operating budget, compared to the last Budget; 45 percent will enable support staff to be funded in the areas that they need to be. The reason why that increase is so substantial this Budget is because in 2016 the National Government froze the operating budget—it froze that budget, which meant that those support staff working did not have the hours to provide for children when they need to. That is not building foundations, and it does hurt our kids.

I spent a day in Wainuiomata Primary School when the New Zealand Educational Institute ran a campaign of walking in the shoes of a support staff person, and I could not believe how hard people on the front line worked in terms of providing care on a daily basis and extra support to teaching staff. More often than not, those support staff gave extra hours beyond what they were funded for, because the kids needed it; because there was nothing else there. While being paid the minimum wage in some cases, they worked extra for free. So many of our front-line services for the past decade have operated on goodwill: police, teachers, nurses, midwives, teacher aides. For the past nine years, the National Government has done surpluses from the free hours they have stolen from these people and their families, and it’s about time we gave it back.

The Budget surpluses delivered have not worked under that, and it’s long overdue that we start reinvesting in that area. A combination of additional funding for support staff and for special education will enable good things to happen in that space. As well as this, we’ve got early childhood education (ECE)—the first universal increase in a decade, benefiting more than 200,000 children and 4,100 providers. For so long, I have seen community-based ECEs that are not for profit, that are trying to keep their numbers low, and that really believe in having fully trained teachers, struggle—struggle—to be able to keep operating in an increasingly privatised market for early childhood education. It is so good to see those teachers who care about our youngest are able to be funded in a way where they can do their job properly.

It is of great value to have those areas looked after, because that is what really builds the foundation for New Zealand in generations to come. I want to see a country where our kids in education—family support is invested in. I would rather see a country that builds schools, not prisons. I would like the next generation of New Zealanders to be resilient, strong, well-educated, healthy, warm, and dry, and not to have to be investing in areas that will be detrimental to their future. That’s why this Budget builds foundations, that’s why this Budget invests in the things that really matter, and that’s why this Budget will deliver to New Zealanders for generations to come. I am proud to see education invested in, because that is something that gives children in New Zealand real opportunity, far beyond building a mega prison, which the National Party would much rather waste its money on.

I commend the Minister of Finance and I commend our support partners in delivering an excellent Budget that delivers to New Zealanders on an ongoing basis. Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker.

MATT DOOCEY (National—Waimakariri): Thank you very much, Madam Assistant Speaker. Very much like that speech from Ginny Andersen, I would call the Budget awkward. It’s just kind of been all a bit awkward, really, hasn’t it? No one really knows. I mean, here we had it—we were all poised on Thursday, and we didn’t go into urgency. It all just went really quiet. It was all a bit awkward. And then we’ve got one of the key policy areas, health, and we’ve got the health Minister overseas. It’s all a bit awkward. I mean, maybe some of his colleagues chipped in to send him in a plane overseas, and I would too, because that’s a Budget that has under-delivered in health.

Look at mental health. Mental health, because of the new Government, was a political football in the last election. They talked up a big game about action. “Action”, they said. They inherited $100 million in a mental health contingency fund. Already, they’ve short-changed the mental health community, eight months in. Yes, they’ve announced $25 million towards school-based mental health professionals and $10 million to appease the Greens with free counselling, but where’s the other $60 million? It’s missing. It’s disappeared. It’s all just getting a bit awkward.

And then we have Minister after Minister coming to the House—it’s almost like a competition of who can say the most awkward quote. You’ve got Chris Hipkins, who says, “They’re not broken promises, they’re just promises we haven’t delivered.” And then there was this other kind of awkward quote: Ron Mark said, “Judge a Government by not what they say or believe but what they do.” Well, where’s the money for mental health, then? Where’s the action? Where is the money for mental health that was promised?

In fact, all they’ve done by this Budget is actually prove what a cynical ploy the mental health review is—kicking the issues down the road for another year. We’ve already got people in the mental health community clearly outlining their concerns. “One of the dangers is that this review isn’t going to tell us anything we [don’t] know already.”—that was Shaun Robinson from the Mental Health Foundation. We also know that Kevin Allan said there is need for action, not an inquiry. And then we have just one more Minister coming down to the House, and even more awkward quotes. The Hon Nanaia Mahuta said today, “It’s not being cut, it’s just being reprioritised.” I mean, how awkward is that?

I tell you what, in sport—because that’s what question time seems to be at the moment with all these questions going two up and two down—we say, “The scoreboard never lies; look at the scoreboard.” Well, in Budget 2017, the former National Government announced $224 million for mental health. That was the baseline that these guys had to beat, and they failed. What have they announced? Well, I actually mapped out all their pledges for mental health, and out of about 20, they get five, and that’s only because two parties repeated the mental health review inquiry. They only got five out of 20.

And I’ll tell you what they’re missing: David Clark said in November, as the Minister of Health, that all people going to their GP for mental health issues—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): I apologise to the member. The time has come for me to leave the chair for the dinner break.

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

DEPUTY SPEAKER: When we were last here, prior to the dinner break, Matt Doocey had the floor, and he has 48 seconds remaining to speak should he so wish.

MATT DOOCEY: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. It was actually a 10-minute call, so I had 5 minutes and 48 seconds left.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Split call—OK.

MATT DOOCEY: Thank you very much, Madam Deputy Speaker. I spoke just before the dinner break. I was thinking about what I would call this Budget. And I must say, before I get into it: how good was Simon Bridges leading off as Opposition leader? There’re many people in this room who will remember the Hon Andrew Little. Now, let’s go back there. What a car crash—what a car crash that was. Night and day—that is the difference between Andrew Little and Simon Bridges. What a fantastic Opposition leader’s speech. It clearly defined the narrative of this Budget—a “Broken Promises Budget”.

I’d go one step further. I called the Budget a bit awkward, because that’s kind of what it was. Everyone upped sticks on the Thursday afternoon, and nothing else was said. Everyone kind of looked around a bit awkwardly, and then we come back and the health Minister’s overseas and the rumour is even some of his colleagues chipped in to get him offshore. It was all just a bit awkward, wasn’t it? Then we had something quite bizarre. See, I put up a mental health question in question time, and it was transferred to the finance Minister. They wouldn’t even give the Associate Ministers of Health a go at responding to the issues about the missing millions in mental health.

This Government talked up a big game in mental health at the last election. They inherited $100 million, and they announced a couple of small pledges—and, fair enough, they were pretty good: support in schools and free counselling for 18- to 25-year-olds. But, actually, when you added that up, it was only about $45 million. Where’s the $50 million to $60 million that’s left? And then Grant Robertson got up in the House and said, “Oh, the advisers have looked back into it, and we’ve actually decided that some of the money for the DHBs will be for mental health.” Well, that’s interesting, because if you go back through the Budget dossier, you will not see any reference to increased ring-fencing for mental health funding for district health boards (DHBs).

I’m looking forward to that advice coming back, because I’ve got a theory that there’s probably a few advisers desperately calling up the DHBs now, informing them of that little windfall—because, of course, they had to plug the gap, because people had realised there was a short-changing of the mental health sector by $50 million. Now, these were important initiatives. One was to put mental health services for young prisoners in correctional facilities. Why have they short-changed mental health by the tune of $50 million?

I do want to take the opportunity just to talk about, well, highways. It’s pretty topical in my electorate of Waimakariri. We’re the third - fastest growing electorate in the country. Of course, under the last National Government we built the Western Belfast Bypass. The sod was turned in 2014 and it opened in 2017. Then we started construction on the northern corridor—actually, a highway that’s been on the books since the 1960s, and it was a National Government that got it under way. That’s going to open in 2020. So last year we announced the next stage: the Belfast to Pegasus motorway. Of course, the reason I’m bringing it up in this Budget debate is because the Government’s stripped out all the money for State highways.

I had a feeling we were going to lose this new proposed motorway extension, including the Woodend bypass, which has been long overdue. We advocated for it and we thought we got it across the line. So I wrote a letter to—oh, that’s right—the transport Minister, the Hon Phil Twyford. And, actually, the media spoke to him as well—David Hill from the North Canterbury News. He said in his email response to David Hill that one Matt Doocey, MP for Waimakariri, was being disingenuous, was being “oppositional; politicking”, and was making it up. He said it was still on track—so I thought, “Well, he’s the Minister; he’ll know.”

But then, take this: last week I got invited to the Pegasus and Woodend residents association AGM, but, of course, I was in the House and I couldn’t get leave to go down. The New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) turned up to that residents group because they were invited to give an update on when the construction would start on the Woodend bypass. The NZTA guy turned up, and, fair to say, he mightn’t have been the company man, but he turned around and said, “The Woodend bypass is off the table. The Woodend bypass is no longer a priority for the Labour Government. The Woodend bypass will not be constructed because the Labour Government’s prioritising transport initiatives in main cities.” Those were the words of the NZTA, and that is the announcement that is going to happen more and more around regional New Zealand. Vital infrastructure that the past National Government committed to in Budget 2017 has been gutted out of the regions, just like the short-changing of mental health funding in this Budget of 2018. Shame on that Government.

MICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): I’m delighted to stand up to speak in this debate, and I’m here to give that previous member, Matt Doocey, a “Wood-end bypass” of his own. I want to refer back—please think charitably on that comment.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: I don’t know that that’s very parliamentary!

MICHAEL WOOD: I want to refer back to the comments of the right honourable Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, when she spoke after the Budget was read in this Chamber. One quote that really stuck out for me was her comment that this Budget isn’t just about this year, it’s not just about this parliamentary term; it’s actually about future generations. Those are the terms in which we are thinking about this Budget, and in my comments this evening, I want to focus on some of the long-term investments that this Government is putting forward that are going to pay off in terms of New Zealanders’ health, well-being, and happiness in the years to come.

Before I get to those, I just do need to reflect a little bit on some of the comments that have been made in the debate this evening. The first one I want to reflect back on—and it came through a number of National Party speeches; it had obviously been produced from the research unit, and different National Party MPs were trying to use it in a slightly different way—came out in the form of an accusation that this Government was some kind of three-headed monster, or, as Sarah Dowie put it, a three-headed Hydra. Well, what I just want to explain briefly, for those members of the House who didn’t study classical studies while they were at school, is that the thing about Hydras is that they’re immortal and every time you attack them they just come back stronger. That is going to be the case with this Government.

In fact, I want to thank members on the opposite side of the House for drawing attention to the fact that this coalition is proudly—is proudly—a coalition of three parties: three real parties with real leaders and real MPs. I’ve got to say, it’s good to have friends in this Chamber. The Labour Party wants to acknowledge New Zealand First and the Greens for being real parties in this coalition and for making a real contribution to this Budget.

I want to talk specifically about a couple of those measures: first, a couple of measures that the New Zealand First Party has particularly advocated for in this Budget. The first one is the Provincial Growth Fund. I’ve got to say that after nine years of the provinces feeling neglected, they finally have a Government that is prepared to stump up and do what the previous Government would not and put in the investment to partner up, to link arms, with local councils, local communities, and local businesses in our provinces, to make sure that there are sustainable work and good opportunities for the people of our provinces. It is a tragedy that young people, every single year, have to leave their home towns in rural and regional New Zealand. There should be opportunities for them there, and this Government is going to work with those communities to make sure that that happens. I want to commend the Provincial Growth Fund to this House, and I think that many of those members who are chipping away opposite aren’t going to be so bold about opposing the measures that are funded by that Provincial Growth Fund in the years to come that create jobs and opportunities in the regions that they represent.

There’s one other smaller measure that came through in the Budget that hasn’t been spoken about that much in the House. Well, it’s small in dollar cost, but it’s going to be big in terms of the impact. It, again, was an initiative that was driven by our partners in the New Zealand First Party—and I want to specifically acknowledge the Hon Tracey Martin—and that was the additional allowance that was provided for in the Budget for grandparents and carers who are looking after their grandchildren. Just a small acknowledgment of the amazing work that those people do, by way of a clothing allowance—those people who go out of their way, often picking up the shards of broken families, to look after kids, to nurture them, and to give them a good home. They haven’t had much support over the years, and this Budget, through the advocacy of the Hon Tracey Martin and the collective work of the Government, is doing something about that.

Turning to our friends in the Green Party, there are a lot of major initiatives championed by the Green Party that I want to acknowledge in my comments tonight. The first one is the $100 million Green Investment Fund, and what a great initiative. This Budget’s actually about being positive. It’s about saying, “What are the opportunities out there for New Zealanders and the communities that they live in?” And that’s the thing: often when we talk about environmental issues in this House it’s always talked about like a cost, but actually there are enormous opportunities for communities to grow and thrive if we put the funding in to support good initiatives at the local level. Good initiatives around renewable energy, good initiatives around energy efficiency—these things will actually help New Zealand’s economy and give New Zealanders good sustainable jobs in the years to come. I commend that initiative to the House.

Of course, also, a major win—acknowledging the Hon Eugenie Sage here—is in terms of rebuilding the Department of Conservation after years of funding cuts. I have spoken to rangers, people who have dedicated their lives to looking after the flora and fauna, the forests and the birds of this country, who walked away in the last nine years because they were abandoned by that Government in amongst the savage funding cuts and the commercialisation of that department. We are putting that right, building the foundations of a Department of Conservation that can do the work that we all want it to through this Budget.

This Budget is about the generational span of time. It is about long-term initiatives. Let me list a few others of those. One that I don’t think has been spoken about much in this House, but I’m incredibly proud of, is the fact that this Government has through this Budget—and it will in future Budgets—once again, put money into the New Zealand Superannuation Fund. This Government says that every single New Zealander, not just the New Zealanders who are retired today but people of my generation and people of future generations, deserve to have the security of knowing that New Zealand superannuation will always be there for them. That is a bedrock of a stable and a decent society—that people in the evening of their years know that they will not have to live in poverty, that there will be a basic income to support them. So I’m really proud of that. It’s a long-term policy. There’s no pay-off for anyone in this Budget today, but in 20 years’ time, 30 years’ time, that means that we will be able to afford New Zealand superannuation for the men and women of this country. I’m incredibly proud of that.

Let’s also add the winter heating payment in there. We’re not going to see our pensioners shivering through the winter this year, being too afraid to turn the heater on, as many of them are, because they’re stuck on low incomes and the cost of power is too high. We are doing something about that. So the beneficiaries and the pensioners of New Zealand on 1 July will be getting that payment because of this Budget. It’s not a huge amount, but it’s going to make it possible for them to flick that switch on and stay warm and healthy through the winter. I’m very surprised that the members opposite might choose that as a measure to try and make political capital out of. I challenge them, in fact, as I think Ministers on this side of the House have challenged them over the fees-free policy. It’s all very well to criticise it, but please front up and tell us that you’ll take that measure away.

I want to talk about the research and development tax credit delivered through this Budget, and acknowledge the Hon Megan Woods. That is about the long term. It is about turning around New Zealand’s sluggish productivity performance. It’s about supporting businesses who invest in innovation and research and development so that we can drive a high-wage, high-skill economy, and provide the jobs and the quality of experience that we need to retain people in New Zealand and really and truly build shared prosperity for all New Zealanders. Our private sector research and development lags behind pretty much every other country in the developed world. This Government in this Budget has said that we will do something about it, and that is going to be a $300 million investment most years into research and development and into a more dynamic economy with good jobs for our people.

I want to speak about primary healthcare and the steps that have been taken to rebuild the foundations there: the fact that 500,000 of our Kiwi families are going to find it $20 or $30 a visit cheaper to go and visit the family doctor. That is going to make a huge difference. That’s going to make a huge difference for those families when someone’s sick in the household, but it’s also, again, about the long term, because if we actually support people at the primary healthcare level in the community, we make sure that that cold or flu doesn’t turn into pneumonia and that person doesn’t end up in the tertiary health system. This is about investing in people—

Barbara Kuriger: What about rural health?

MICHAEL WOOD: —and communities and the long-term health of our people. And the member asks, “What about rural health?” Well, I can very happily tell that member that every single person in her constituency will also benefit from these measures as well, as well as the 13-year-olds, incidentally—thank you for reminding me—who are also going to be eligible for free doctors visits under this Budget as well. I’m sure the member welcomes that as well. And again, I welcome the member to stand up and tell us if she would reverse those measures as well, and bring in the tax cuts that that party proposed in their place.

Finally, I want to talk about the best long-term investment of all, and that is education. I’m very happy because my local secondary school Mount Roskill Grammar School, an awesome, diverse, decile 4 school that does amazing work in our community, is now going to be funded for a school nurse through this Budget—a school nurse who’s going to be able to help support the health and well-being and the mental health needs of the students who go to that school. That’s a real win. There’s huge wins across the education sector: 1,500 new teachers; hundreds of new school classrooms that are going to be built as a result of this Budget.

I do need to speak briefly to the confusion on the other side of the House. We heard the Hon Nicky Wagner earlier on telling us that every sector has been short-changed in this Budget—in other words, they should be getting more money. Yet we heard the Hon Simon Bridges earlier telling us that this is a tax and spend Budget—we are spending too much. So which one is it? I know that Opposition is hard. Along with my colleagues on this side of the House, we spent a while there. But my message to those members is: get real and get positive, and come up with a positive vision, because that is what people will actually respond to. That is what this Government is getting on and doing.

Through this Budget we are building the foundations of a positive future for all New Zealanders. I, as a Labour member of this three-headed coalition, this immortal Hydra, am very proud to commend it to the House. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

NICOLA WILLIS (National): A Government’s first Budget should really be quite a simple affair because there’s really only two things you have to do. The first is you meet your campaign commitments, and the second is you prioritise your funding. Well, you know, this Government has failed on both counts. It’s very easy to run around the country campaigning on wiping every tear from every eye. It’s very easy to promise the earth, but it is much harder to deliver.

I want to take my call today to talk about early childhood education (ECE) because that is a case in point. That is a sector who expected great things from the Labour-led Government because they went around the country and they said, “Don’t worry, guys, we’ve got it.” Here’s Chris Hipkins. What did he say? He said, “Labour will restore the higher funding rate for early childhood education services with 100 percent qualified teachers.” That’s what he said. That’s what he promised. Then we had Labour members opposite up and down the country signing a pledge—signing a pledge to the teacher union—saying, “We will reduce teacher to child ratios. We will restore the goal of 100 percent trained teachers.”

And then we even had it in their fiscal plan. This is an archaic document that members opposite may like to familiarise themselves with. You promised New Zealanders you’d deliver on this, and every time we said “We don’t think your fiscal plan stacks up.”, you said, “Oh no, it does. The Hon Grant Robertson knows exactly what he’s doing. It’s all costed. It’s all fine. We’re going to deliver all of it.” So I had a look in the fiscal plan, and here we are: increased funds for 100 percent qualified ECE centres. Oh! And I see $279 million, and it was all going to start in this financial year. It’s all there. It’s all in the fiscal plan. So it’s pretty clear. That was the commitment in early childhood education.

So then I say, “OK. Well, that’s fine—that was the commitment. Let’s have a look and see if we can find it in the Budget.” Here it is: Vote Education. Let’s see if we can find that promise, if it made it out of the fiscal plan and into the Budget. I looked through and I looked through, and I couldn’t find it. I found a few other things. I did find $2.8 billion for tertiary education, so I guess that was a priority—that was more important than young children and their learning. I did find some other things. I found some tax cuts for pretty-horse owners, so that’s great too, but I’m not sure it’s going to help children. Then I found some funding for a new embassy in Sweden. So the Government did manage to prioritise some things, to give them credit, but they didn’t prioritise the right things, and that is what a Budget is all about. It is about meeting your commitments, the commitments—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Not mine.

NICOLA WILLIS: —you made to the New Zealand—sorry, Madam Deputy Speaker, not yours. It is about meeting the Government’s commitments that they made to the New Zealand public—that they went up and down the country promising they would deliver. Well, their word on that is something we could question if we chose to.

So then we say, “If the ECE pledge from the fiscal plan isn’t there, what’s there instead?” So we’ve had Chris Hipkins saying, “Oh, look, you know, there’s a lot of money in there for ECE.” What he fails to tell members of this House is that National more than doubled funding for early childhood education during its time in office. Every single year, we increased funding for early childhood education. In fact, in our first couple of years in office, we increased funding for early childhood education by—oh, I’ve got the figures here from the Parliamentary Library—15 percent in the first year, 15 percent in the second year. How much did Chris Hipkins increase the early childhood budget by this year? Oh, that’s right: 6 percent. So not quite as strong as National’s record there.

So then we say, “OK, but look, let’s give him credit. Maybe he really meant to do better, because he has put in an additional subsidy increase.” That is a good thing and that will be welcomed. It’s modest, but it will be welcomed. So how much is that? Well, it works out at $1.30 per child per week. So it’s very hard for me to understand how you define that as generous, and it’s very easy for me to understand why the Early Childhood Council has said it’s significantly underwhelming and why the NZEI has said that ECE needed a lot more attention.

So the only excuse left on the other side of the House for these broken commitments is that National didn’t campaign on those things. So that’s the new standard. If National didn’t campaign on it, Labour doesn’t have to deliver it. Well, I say members of the New Zealand public deserve a lot better than that. When people make a commitment, it should be met. It was not met in this Budget. Early childhood education was short-changed at the expense of a fund for Winston Peters, an embassy in Sweden, and tax cuts for pretty horses. I say that’s a Government that doesn’t have its priorities right.

Dr PARMJEET PARMAR (National): Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. What a scene it was leading up to Budget day, because for almost all questions that we asked, whether it was about housing, or whether it was about law and order or support for research and development, the answer was “Three more sleeps to go.”, “Two more sleeps to go.”, “One more sleep to go.”, and then came Budget day. And on Budget day, what we got was a big debt for New Zealand—a big debt for all New Zealanders—and taxes, new taxes. This Government campaigned on bringing new taxes only in the next term—if they ever get back in Government—that were based on their Tax Working Group’s recommendations, but in six months, what have we seen? At least four new taxes.

And of course there is spending. There is spending, but not on issues that matter to an average family. What we saw is that it is going to be more than $10 billion that is going to be borrowed by this Labour-led Government. They’re going to extract $2.3 billion out of New Zealanders’ pockets. This is not from taxpayers’ pockets; this will be from everyone’s pocket, whether they are on benefit or a low income, because people will be paying for fuel tax, the regional fuel tax, irrespective of their income level. So they don’t care about low and middle income families or families that are on benefit.

What we have seen in this Budget is that they were not prepared to be in Government. They were in a position for nine years and they were screaming loud that, yep, they were ready to be in Government. Nine years is a long time—one term, two terms, three terms—and when they came into Government, this was their first opportunity, and this is the Budget we have from them: a flop Budget.

As the research, science, and innovation spokesperson, I’m really appalled to see that this Government has nothing to offer for research and development growth other than R & D tax credit policy. Again and again, we hear members of the Government saying, “Oh, we cannot deliver the vision with the same old approach.” It’s their vision they cannot deliver with the same old approach, but for supporting R & D, what they have done is bring back a policy that is from 2007—an at least 11-year-old policy that they want to bring in. And this policy, we don’t even know what it’s going to look like because it’s going through the consultation period, but they have decided to get rid of growth grants. So yes, growth grants offered through Callaghan Innovation—they have already decided to get rid of growth grants, saving millions of dollars for their unnecessary spending.

I ask the Minister to take five minutes out to read Callaghan Innovation’s annual report to realise that through growth grants, we have seen a significant increase in business research and development. We have seen, overall, a 29 percent growth of business research and development in just two years—2014-16—and businesses that were directly benefited through Callaghan Innovation showed a 46 percent increase in business research and development. So this is a significant model. This is a very successful model, and the Minister wants to replace this model. Actually, there is nothing to replace—get rid of that model, bring in an at least 11-year-old policy, and say that “Oh, we cannot achieve our vision with the same old approach.”

What they’re doing is pushing the financial risks on to business, saying, “Go out, find money. Once you start making money, we will give you a 12.5 percent tax credit.” They don’t care because they don’t understand how research and development works. There are companies hugely contributing to a country’s research and development but not making any profit, so there is nothing—nothing—for those companies in this Budget. They do not support small and medium sized enterprises. We are 96 percent small and medium sized enterprises. We know that the Minister Iain Lees-Galloway has made the comment that he doesn’t care about businesses shutting down. Yes, there’ll be businesses going belly up, and it will be sad, not just for those businesses; it will be sad for the whole country. Those people will have no choice but to go on some form of benefit—yes, to go on some form of benefit.

Well, actually, there is another option, and that option is to get on a plane to another country, because we have seen that the Labour Party, when they’re in Government, have a really good track record of driving New Zealanders out of New Zealand. So, again, this is what this Labour Government wants to do. This Budget is not about New Zealand or New Zealanders; this Budget is about New Zealand First and to keep Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in that position as the Prime Minister. So we do not support this Budget. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

MARJA LUBECK (Labour): Tēnā koe, Madam Deputy Speaker, and thank you for the opportunity to take a call and speak about Budget 2018. This Budget lays the foundation for a better future, and I’m proud to be able to stand here today as part of a Government that is committed to delivering for New Zealanders—a Government that is focused on transformation. No, we can’t, of course, fix everything in one Budget, and that is why this is the very first Budget that starts setting us up on the road to rebuilding. This Budget is expressing the values of a coalition Government, and I’m actually quite proud to be part of the three-headed Hydra—the reference made earlier by my colleague Michael Wood.

We’ve heard a lot of criticism coming from the other side of the House, and I guess that is the job of the Opposition, but what they shouldn’t do is they shouldn’t continue to bring up misconceptions that just confuse people. I was watching Q+A over the weekend, and Amy Adams in her Budget speech made a statement referring to it. She actually said that Labour’s got the numbers wrong. I find it a bit rich, because what she did in Q+A is she made a comment that National tax cuts would have given New Zealanders a thousand dollars a week. Now, just think about that. She said that the tax cuts from National would have given New Zealanders a thousand dollars per week—and this is accusing this Government of overpromising. All I can say is I’m grateful that we have the Hon Grant Robertson do the numbers for us, and not the Hon Amy Adams.

Several other Opposition members have been grasping at straws to try and discredit the foundations that this Budget is putting in place, for example, in health. Now this Budget is putting in place $3.2 billion over four years in operating funding and an additional $750 million new capital for health projects. Now, according to the Opposition, they have invested more in health. What they forgot to mention, conveniently, is that Terranova case—that case that they dragged through three courts, where the Supreme Court ultimately decided that they had to pay up. So to include this $2 billion pay equity settlement in the health budget is a little bit like the lines that I’ve seen mentioned somewhere—like Steven Joyce losing a copyright case to Eminem and calling it investing in the music industry. You can’t count it into your Budget.

But let’s focus on the positive. For example, we have great investment in education. We all agree that Kiwis deserve the best education. This Government agrees with it, and in the Budget is a 45 percent increase in funding in education. This Budget provides $1.6 billion in new operating funding over four years, and I’m sure nobody will dispute that there’s still more to do. We still need more investments, but that only shows how big the gap is that we need to plug. It just shows how much more catch-up there is to do over the years of underfunding. The education investment in this Budget is actually the biggest increase that the sector has seen in over a decade.

What the Budget also has is the first universal adjustment for early childhood education and also the very first investment in over a decade, with $500 million to better support early learning needs of 200,000 children. So what this Budget does is it employs 1,500 more teachers. It invests in teacher-aides. It builds hundreds more classrooms. It increases funding for those who need that extra support. That’s what this Budget delivers.

It also makes a crucial investment in the protection of our workers from exploitation. The Hon Minister Iain Lees-Galloway mentioned that before, but it’s really important that we put extra funding in the number of labour inspectors. The majority of New Zealand’s employers are doing a good job by our workers, but there are still those that don’t, and we need to ensure that the labour inspectorate has the resources to ensure that our New Zealand workers are protected from exploitation. That particular investment is good for working people but also for businesses because it creates a level playing field for them. Those businesses can get on with their job without unfair undermining.

My favorite line in the Hon Grant Robertson’s speech, actually, was that this Government will not declare success while at the same time underfunding the services we rely on. This Budget is doing exactly that. It starts to rebuild the foundations while growing the economy, so it’s ready for the future and it creates a New Zealand where everyone gets a fair go. Only then can we refer to the New Zealand economy as a truly rock star economy. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

JAN TINETTI (Labour): I’m delighted to stand here in support of our 2018 Budget. Budget 2018 marks the territory for a fairer society, and that’s a really exciting place to be in. We are moving to get our public services back on track. One of those services, of course, that I am so passionate about is our education, which has been severely underfunded and under-supported for quite some time, including a funding freeze in early childhood education (ECE) because of the focus in the previous regime on quantity, not quality; a low morale and burn-out, causing a teacher supply crisis; underfunded growth leading to overcrowded classrooms—the list goes on. But I don’t want to concentrate on the negative, because what I see is a way forward. I see hope and I see light, because this Budget sees the biggest increase in education in over a decade. A former colleague of mine, the principal of Greerton Village School, said to me recently, “I’m really encouraged by this Budget—certainly, steps in the right direction, but it’s going to take a long time to undo the wreckage of the last nine years.”

Let’s start with ECE—we’ve heard that mentioned in the House tonight. We here recognise that quality is important. It’s not just about quantity; it is quality, and that is why Budget 2018 delivers the first universal cost adjustment for early learning since 2008. It is a terrible indictment on the former Government that they did not make an increase to those centres in 10 years—10 years those centres had to struggle through. We have done that. We have made that universal increase adjustment. That impacts on over 4,000 providers. How exciting to see that start, and just take that into account—it is a start.

Learning support: this was the area, actually, that I found, as a former educator, the most exciting part of the education budget. I cannot remember when we have had such a big investment into learning support. Every single one of my colleagues will tell you that they have had to rearrange the operational grant over many, many years just to support our children with learning support needs. That has been a really difficult time in the education sector.

There’s $21.5 million going into the early intervention services—again, I cannot remember when they last had such an increase into those services. That means so much for those children. This is what it means: I had children that would come to my school at five who were identified as 3-year-olds as needing learning support, who didn’t get it until six weeks before they started school. This enables those children to get the supports that they need in the time that they need it.

Ongoing resourcing scheme (ORS) funding increasing—so many times, I hear my former colleagues, and the teachers, and the teacher-aides saying, “If only that child could get access to the ORS funding”, and it was not able to happen because it had been completely capped and the money wasn’t going into that area. There’s a thousand more children that we are going to see have access to that, meaning that they will get experts, a speech-language therapist, physiotherapist, psychologist, teacher-aides—the support that they need, when they need it. That is really exciting, and that is true inclusive education.

One that hasn’t been talked about a lot—and this is one that I am incredibly excited about—is an increase to the very much-capped Intensive Wraparound Service. This is to support the children or the learners in our school with the severest behaviour needs. How often have we heard over the years of children with severe behaviour needs causing the biggest issues because the support hasn’t been there for them? So it is great to see that in this Budget we are going to be supporting those particular children by putting an increase into the Intensive Wraparound Service.

Finally, I want to talk about the great investments we are making into supporting Māori students and strengthening Te Reo. I am really excited to see that we are looking to restore support to allow our Māori learners to learn as Māori in English-medium settings. That is great, because we are supporting identity, and it’s brilliant.

The increased overall investments to our vulnerable are great, but we acknowledge there’s more to do, and we commend this Budget to the House.

BARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. This Budget was an absolute flop. Every so-called crisis that this Government called when they were in Opposition has been given a pittance—an absolute pittance. Thank goodness we had a royal wedding and a bit of excitement at the weekend, because the public was waiting for something, and no one can actually stand up and say what they got from this Budget—everybody’s disappointed.

I think the line of the weekend—that came in the news—that the Prime Minister used was that “It’s better to be a Prime Minister that tried and missed, than a Prime Minister that hadn’t tried at all.” Let me tell you, from the public’s perspective, it missed. And now we have Minister Hipkins telling us that “We didn’t break our promises; we just haven’t delivered.” How true—how true.

The first thing I wanted to focus on was Waikeria Prison. Now, I’ve got a community in the King Country and Waipā who have spent a lot of time and effort and cost on the development of the extension of Waikeria Prison. They are sitting and they are waiting, and they are waiting, and they are waiting. I can tell you that patience is running out. For goodness’ sake, please, Hon Kelvin Davis, please front up to this community and tell them what you’re going to do. We’ve not seen anything in this Budget. An extensive amount has been put into it.

Now, I know that this prison is an archaic old prison, because I went to visit it for about four hours last year, and it is a very archaic old prison. While none of us want to see more people in prison, I can tell you that the plans for that prison were—we’ve seen the farm, there’s a trade training centre planned. It’s all very well to talk about catch and release, but if you don’t let people out with the skills that—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Not me—not me.

BARBARA KURIGER: Sorry, Madam Deputy Speaker. If people are not let out with the skills to develop their lives going forward, then we all know what’s going to happen. We’re not giving them a first-class chance at rehabilitation. It’s really interesting, for me, reading in the New Zealand Herald of 18 May, that even the unions wanted the Government to urgently improve an expansion of Waikeria Prison, and that’s the Corrections Association of New Zealand. So there you go.

Now, another thing that this Government has done, with great vengeance, is drop the oil and gas bombshell on Taranaki. It’s really interesting, for me, that weeks and weeks ago, when the announcement was made, we were there and we were listening to the absolute disappointment of the Taranaki community. Guess what? It’s taken till this week for the Prime Minister to show up in Taranaki. That is extremely disappointing. That is a major decision. It’s all very well for this Government to be over there, talking about how we’ve got 30-year permits. Well, that’s fine, but, actually, let me tell you that the world will lose confidence pretty jolly quickly. They’re starting to work out where they’re not welcome.

It’s really quite alarming to see how fast those gas supplies are going to run out, and I am prepared to stand here and say, with the figures that I’ve seen, that that gas is going to run out far more quickly than this Government expects. We are going to be buying in gas from other parts of the world where they are welcome, and other countries are going to be starting up coal, and we’re also going to be using coal when it starts to snow. So that’s going to be the result of that policy.

The other thing that’s really interesting for me—and we all have to take care of the environment. I’ve just read an article this week which has really fascinated me, because I’ve lived in Taranaki pretty much all my life, and I’ve just read that “A group of 700 blue whales have been discovered in the South Taranaki Bight, which is due to be the site for seafloor mining operations … The significance of the discovery is huge, considering the area is about to be home to oil and gas rigs”. Now, I watched that pipeline come into the country in 1976. Where I farm is about 2.5 kilometres from where that came in in 1976, and—hello—we can’t disturb it now because some blue whales have been discovered. Well, actually, maybe the blue whales aren’t that turned off by what’s been going on in Taranaki for the last 40 years.

Now we’re going to get on to the rural front and the farming front. So we had Minister Damien O’Connor stand up before with this article that says “Budget gets tick”. Well, I think that the Hon Damien O’Connor has a different paradigm to me, because I think he took a rather slim view and looked at this version—and it’s about perspective. It says, “While not catching a windfall … [there are] some gains”. So it’s not a windfall. So while it might have got a tick, it is definitely not a windfall. It talked about the $85 million for Mycoplasma bovis being only a deposit, and I want to give a call out tonight to those farmers out there who have been worried—who have been extremely worried, particularly with 1 June coming up. We don’t know where it is, we don’t know how far it’s gone, and that is likely to be only a deposit.

I’m looking forward to that decision that, apparently, Cabinet is going to make—that decision next week—because everyone has been quite frightened out there. The $9.3 million is described in this article as something that will barely register. So it’s all very well to say “Budget gets tick”, but $9.3 million is something that will barely register. So I think, with all the talk around biosecurity, it’s very important that we might be looking forward to some more money to come for M. bovis.

The next thing that’s talked about is National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT). We’ve had a huge discussion about NAIT, and I was very pleased to see the other day that these recommendations have been released, because there have been 38 recommendations released and 23 can be implemented promptly by the agency Operational Solutions for Primary Industries New Zealand. So while some farmers perhaps could’ve improved the way they did things, we have actually got NAIT here with 23 recommendations which can be improved promptly, and I hope to see them improved promptly.

The next thing was OVERSEER. Now, OVERSEER is described as something that you almost need a degree to use, yet it has a big impact on how we do things in farming. So it’s great to see that there’s money—$5 million—gone into OVERSEER. It’s a great tool for a general tool, but by farm by farm and on per farm it’s been very, very difficult to use.

So I do want to note that one of the things I agree with the Minister is that the Sustainable Farming Fund money is a real bonus, and it will go some way to help drive better behaviour change based on research, rather than bear the expense of trying to clean catchments up afterwards. So I do agree on that one. It’s very important that we put money into finding out answers.

The thing that I really want to finish on this evening is rural communities. Yes, some money was given to the midwives, but, reading in the headlines, we still have midwives saying “That was the final straw, I can’t do it anymore”. I just want to say that this blue piece of paper—this is the blue-sky advantage that the Government gave to rural communities. I’ve had high hopes for the rural communities portfolio, and I looked high and hard—there’s nothing. There’s absolutely nothing for rural communities. I’m really disappointed.

I’ve got an Official Information Act request here that came back today from the Hon Damien O’Connor and asked for a delay on the communications regarding Rural Health Alliance Aotearoa New Zealand and all communications between them. We were talking about $1 per person who lives in rural New Zealand. I’ve got a petition going, and I would like to challenge the Hon Damien O’Connor to come and sign my petition, to help get some funding for the Rural Health Alliance, because they missed out. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

CLAYTON MITCHELL (NZ First): Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I’m sure everybody in the House felt that wave of depression go over them. I’m just going to lift us up out of the doom and gloom and finish on a positive note. Of course, we’ve got a great speaker following myself. I’m sort of like the interlude—the build-up, if you will.

I’d like to first start by acknowledging the revenue Minister and Grant Robertson, in fact, for this wonderful Budget. I thank all the Ministers and Cabinet for the time, the effort, the energy, and the consultation that’s gone into putting this Budget together. I actually even had a couple of my Tory mates—I remember talking the other night to Mr O’Connor about this very thing, that even a few of my Tory mates said, “Bloody hell, I was impressed with that. This is a hell of a lot better than what I was expecting.” So there is salvation on the way, all you Tory people out there. I’ll tell you right now, that is a very, very good Budget, and despite all the doom and gloom and all the rhetoric that you have to go through, I think, deep down, some of you are actually very, very pleased with it.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: I actually don’t have to go through any of that rhetoric. Don’t bring the Speaker into it.

CLAYTON MITCHELL: No, I won’t do that again, Madam Deputy Speaker. Thank you very much. But there is some good news on the way.

I’d also like to thank very much, from the bottom of my heart, the huge service that the National Party caucus has delivered to this House, and particularly to all New Zealanders, for choosing their leader, because what a woeful presentation we got—

Kiritapu Allan: “#SaveSimon”.

CLAYTON MITCHELL: “Save Simon”. The woeful presentation that we got—in fact, it was more like a Duncan Garner presentation.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! In this House, we use full names appropriately.

CLAYTON MITCHELL: Mr Simon Bridges.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Actually, it’s “the Honourable”.

CLAYTON MITCHELL: It was more like a Duncan Garner speech, to be honest. It was filled more with downtrodden rhetoric around clichés and innuendos. In actual fact, it was full of nonsense and contradictions pretty much right the way through it.

He talked about building—well, he talks about a lot of things, to be honest. But a lot of irony was also involved in that, particularly around the fact that he talked about the pooh-poohing of the KiwiBuild project. He said, “It’s just a plan that’s not working.” Well, I have to say to the National Party, at least we’ve got a plan. The previous Government did nothing for nine years to deal with one of the biggest crises that this country faces. Not only did they do nothing to remedy the problem of housing and building houses; they sold off our State houses, and then they flooded our shores with migration numbers that we just could not cope with—73,400 migrants being thrown into an already overwhelmed economy, who we just couldn’t deal with.

We’ve taken a very sensible approach over this side. We have set up the KiwiBuild, we are going to be building houses, and we will deliver on what we said we’re going to deliver on. You’re just going to have to be patient and watch this space, because, like Pantene, it doesn’t happen overnight but it certainly will happen.

Mr Bridges spoke about an economy of trickle-down neo-liberal economics that was going to get us out of the trouble. Well, I’m telling you, this side has got a different approach to building an economy, and it’s taking that economy-building from the bottom up, where we’re looking at real wages to New Zealanders, working towards a living wage, and giving tax breaks to those companies to ensure that they can afford to pay them. Now that is sensible, as opposed to the National Party, or should I call them the “International Party”, who are more interested in giving their rich mates big tax breaks—$400 million was your budgeted tax break for the top 10 percent of earners—rather than looking after the people that really needed it.

What about the corporate welfare that they dished out? What about all that? The South Canterbury Finance bailout, and AMI—$1.72 billion down the drain for their mates, thank you very much.

What about building an abattoir—an abattoir in the Middle East—so we could send our live produce there and employ people in the Middle East to build an abattoir for $11 million of hard-earned tax dollars? What an absolute waste of money that was.

What about that flag referendum that New Zealand screamed for? They said New Zealand wanted a flag referendum more than anything else—$25 million of wasted money.

Does everybody remember Rio Tinto? The international foreign company that netted $300 million in profit, but the previous Government decided it would give them $39 million in tax breaks and support.

What about pumping $630 million over five years into the China infrastructure fund—$630 million? What about the $191 million that they put into the—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Order! Would the member come to this Budget.

CLAYTON MITCHELL: Yeah, I’m talking about this Budget.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: It’s just—

CLAYTON MITCHELL: These are the things we’re correcting.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: No, don’t argue with me. I’m asking the member to come to this Budget. It is a wide-ranging debate—

CLAYTON MITCHELL: It is.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: —but, actually, you do have to mention Budget 2018.

CLAYTON MITCHELL: Budget 2018—fantastic. All these problems that we’ve just outlined are being addressed.

Now, we’re talking about a bottom-up economy, where we’re putting a balance into social, economic, and environmental policies to put this country back into the right place and head it in the right direction. Nine years of neglect, and the absolute nonsensical noises that we hear about the problems that we’re faced with by the other side that they created—it was the creation of your lack of funding that got us into this situation in the first place.

So let’s talk about it—social policy. Free doctors visits for 14-year-olds, plus prescriptions—what a huge support that is for family members that are struggling to get by on a day-to-day basis.

What about the 1,800 new police officers looking after our streets that we have been neglecting. Less than 10 percent of burglaries, under that Government, actually got looked at, or got any attention at all. The police force are stretched out like banshees, trying to deal with the flood of crime in this country, and you had no solution for it and no funding. There is $300 million more in Budget 2018.

What about looking after our social responsibility to bring in a winter energy payment for those people most in need? That’s an absolutely fantastic policy and great money well spent, and I’m sure you’ll have a number of your people that you know who will take full advantage of that.

We can’t go past, of course, core issues like health—$3.2 billion is being put into health, $900 million more than under the previous Government. It’s the biggest funding increase in over 10 years. Now it’s of huge benefit, with $750 million of that going towards capital funding, and that’s five times more than the previous Government put in to do the same thing in capital funding. You should have been ashamed of yourselves—a shameful indictment.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Actually, I’m not ashamed.

CLAYTON MITCHELL: And we stopped the—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: I’m not ashamed of myself. Please don’t bring me into the debate.

CLAYTON MITCHELL: Sorry, Madam Deputy Speaker. And we’ve stopped the selling off of our State home assets. That’s social benefit.

Let’s talk about some economic benefits. The Provincial Growth Fund: $1 billion is going into regional economic development, looking at unemployment for the people in the regions that need it the most. As much as we’ve heard just about every member on that side of the House talk about it and say, “Oh, this is terrible. This is just a disgrace.”, they all end up by saying, “Please help us. Please put some of that money into my region.” “Oh, we’d like a little bit more in Northland.”, I heard Matt King talk about. We’ve heard it in Southland from Sarah Dowie. The reality is that New Zealanders understand the importance.

Do you remember—does everybody know how much they put into the regional provincial growth fund last term?

Kiritapu Allan: How much?

CLAYTON MITCHELL: $11 million. That’s 100 times more—$1 billion compared to $11 million. It’s a disgrace. You do not value the people in your regions. It is a good thing that you’ve been kicked out—that that side of the House has been kicked out from this side of the House, to deal with it—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: I value people in the regions. Please don’t bring me—

CLAYTON MITCHELL: Wonderful.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: —into the debate.

CLAYTON MITCHELL: Thank you.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: This is the third time.

CLAYTON MITCHELL: I think it might have been the third time, you’re right.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Three strikes, you’re out.

CLAYTON MITCHELL: Not only that, the $1 billion going into our foreign affairs and trade to boost economic growth, to actually create added value exports in New Zealand, is an absolutely wonderful thing.

I had somebody the other day ask me about the $100 million going into the Auckland infrastructure for the America’s Cup. They said, “Wouldn’t it be better to go into housing or other areas, than $100 million into the America’s Cup?” I said, “You’ve got to understand investment. When you can go and invest into the people that need it the most, the returns are huge.” In fact, when you look at the America’s Cup in Bermuda, the return on investment was 1:5.2—[Madam Deputy Speaker gestures] Yes, Madam Deputy Speaker, would you like say something?

DEPUTY SPEAKER: I’d like you to stop bringing me into the debate.

CLAYTON MITCHELL: Did I do it again?

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yes.

CLAYTON MITCHELL: Crikey, I’m slipping. Righty-o.

I’ve got a minute—I’ve got a minute. So environmentally—I hear people on the other side saying that there was nothing for the environment. Well, we’ve talked about social and we’ve talked about economic. We’re planting a billion trees. We are internalising our externalities. We are dealing with the problem ourselves. Rather then signing ourselves up to a Paris accord and giving $14 billion to foreign economies, we are planting trees to deal with that carbon issue ourselves. Along with that, we are also putting $181 million extra into conservation, which the other side underfunded to the tune of $424 million over the time that they were in Government. It’s an embarrassment to call yourselves a good Government and fiscal leaders.

We’ve got a great Government here. We’ve got a lot on our books. We’re going to deliver for New Zealanders, and we’ve got three years to do it in. And I tell you what, New Zealanders will vote back in the same group because it makes sense.

Hon STUART NASH (Minister of Police): I move, That this debate be now adjourned.

Motion agreed to.

Intelligence and Security Committee

Membership

Hon PHIL TWYFORD (Minister of Housing and Urban Development) on behalf of the Leader of the House: I move, That under section 196 of the Intelligence and Security Act 2017, the House endorse Hon Gerry Brownlee as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee, nominated by the Leader of the Opposition under section 195(1) of the Act and in accordance with section 194(2)(c) of the Act.

Motion agreed to.

Bills

Taxation (Neutralising Base Erosion and Profit Shifting) Bill

Second Reading

Debate resumed from 22 May.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: When we were debating this last, Kiritapu Allan had the floor, and she has eight minutes and 20 seconds remaining to speak.

KIRITAPU ALLAN (Labour): It’s going to be nothing but a monumental task to maintain the momentum of such a vigorous precursory speech for what I’ll be talking on, the Taxation (Neutralising Base Erosion and Profit Shifting) Bill. Look, when I was thinking about the remarks that I’d make—and I’m going to make some brief remarks this evening. But when I was thinking about the remarks I wanted to make in respect of this bill, you know, taxation is an interesting area of law. Some of my colleagues—for example, Dr Deborah Russell—thrive on it and they flourish on it. These are things that make their hearts pump. For others of us, look, I think that if you boil it down to some bare-based principles, most of us understand that—the oft-cited quote is that “Tax is the price of civilisation”, and I think that most of us across this House all understand that.

Now for a country like ours that is significantly dependent on trade, we’re an importing-exporting nation and we operate within a big global world. Most of us agree that we earn a wage and we pay our fair share of the pie, and that pie goes towards things like roads and schools and hospitals and running our nation. But also, too, in a global world we have large overseas companies, multinational companies, that too operate within our communities, that provide very important goods and services that we all benefit from. However, where you make a profit, it’s only right that you also pay your fair share back into that local domicile nation.

I think this is an issue that, globally, many countries have been trying to grapple with, not just us here at home but around the world, and, look, a lot of these multinational corporations engage in aggressive tax planning, often known as base erosion and profit shifting. You have one parent company based in a country. They set up a subsidiary. There’s a whole range of complicated commercial vehicles that you could use to do that, but that smaller subsidiary—I’ll take the example of Google, and I’ll use Google because they submitted on this bill, and they were actually very helpful in terms of, I think, showing a corporate shift in culture. So where many multinational corporations have—and, you know, it’s their right, probably, to try to—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: We’ve just got a time for you now. [Indicates clock on wall]

KIRITAPU ALLAN: Oh, thank you. Is that the accurate time, is it?

DEPUTY SPEAKER: That’s the accurate time.

KIRITAPU ALLAN: Oh, fantastic. I’ve still got four minutes just to fill this House with great thoughts on taxation and globalisation and everything else in between. But, look, one of the things that came through—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: And the bill.

KIRITAPU ALLAN: —in the Google submission was that they have acknowledged that when they operated in terms of—actually, so I don’t stuff it up, and maybe I won’t—

Kieran McAnulty: Can she say that? Can she say “stuff it up” in the House?

KIRITAPU ALLAN: I can say “stuff it up”, can’t I?

DEPUTY SPEAKER: No, it’s not very parliamentary.

KIRITAPU ALLAN: Oh, I cannot say it. I will not make a mistake in this House, Madam Deputy Speaker. One of the things that struck me in their submission was they said that in the past, when a customer bought advertising on Google, their Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore would enter into a contract with that customer. It earned revenue from that contract in Singapore. What Google New Zealand received was arm’s-length remuneration for the services it performed. They went on to say that “We intend to shift our business model from this past approach, such that customers will enter contracts with our New Zealand entity, which will generate revenue from NZ advertising customers, and pay taxes in line with its role in the transaction.” That’s a huge shift in corporate culture, and what this bill here does is it’s about ensuring that New Zealand provides the regulatory environment to ensure that companies who operate across multiple jurisdictions can’t so easily slip through the holes—the many taxation nuances and loopholes—but pay their fair share here.

Therese Turner was mentioned at some length last night. She’s our independent tax adviser for the Finance and Expenditure Committee. I must also, too, acknowledge and laud the contribution that Therese made to the Finance and Expenditure Committee. I think both sides of the House equally felt her contribution. One of the things that she said—it was cited about 15 times last night, so I won’t keep going, but she did say that this was one of the most complicated pieces of legislation to come before this House. She said that in her 30 years as a tax practitioner she’d never encountered a bill this complicated. So I don’t intend to pretend that I am anything of a tax expert, but what I am really thoroughly pleased with is that we as a whole House in this Parliament could come together to make good laws that ensure that New Zealand was benefiting, as it rightly should.

We know that currently there is a gap of somewhere between $200 million and $500 million that we miss out on because companies engage in base erosion and profit shifting. We know that. And so for both sides of this House to work collegially together—I acknowledge the work of the former Government in terms of getting this bill to where it was. Unfortunately, or fortunately, as new members of Parliament, we came into the consideration of this bill midway through, but there were substantive amendments made.

I also want to acknowledge the work of IRD and others, who worked tirelessly to get this piece of legislation right. I know that there were many contributions, many submissions—particularly from the banking community—that might have felt that we went too far, too fast, and that comment came through. But I think that where this House collectively landed was that we must act, and we must act collectively, to ensure that the taxation laws that apply within this country to overseas corporations operating in New Zealand are fair and applicable, and that everybody—all New Zealanders—gain collectively from their operations within this country.

I don’t want to go on in this House too long, but I do want to commend this bill to the House. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Bill read a second time.

Bills

Families Commission Act Repeal bill

Third Reading

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI (Minister for Social Development): I move, That the Families Commission Act Repeal Bill be now read a third time.

The Families Commission Act Repeal Bill repeals the Families Commission Act 2003 in order to disestablish the Families Commission and provides for residual management processes to manage the consequences of disestablishment. This bill intends to update and improve the effectiveness and efficiencies of social science research and advocacy for the interests of families and whānau. This is a straightforward piece of legislation, and every party in this House has shown support for this bill. However, as simple as it may be, the bill plays an important role in supporting this Government’s focus on improving the well-being of all New Zealanders.

Earlier this month, I was proud to announce that we will consult with the public, with NGOs, with iwi, and with iwi organisations on our investing for social well-being approach. Well-being is about the ability of individuals and families to live the lives they aspire to as part of inclusive, equitable, and prosperous communities. This investing for well-being approach goes far beyond the previous Government’s narrow focus on liability and risk. This Government wants to really invest in our people and support them to maximise their potential. Our framework of investing for social well-being will provide a means to truly tackle some of the deeply entrenched social challenges we face as a country. It will allow this Government to support and resource people to improve their well-being and the well-being of others in their whānau and communities, creating a range of positive social outcomes.

The Families Commission’s work has given us a better understanding of the diversity of New Zealand families and whānau, which has helped us to the level of understanding we have today. But our approach is to extend beyond where the previous Government was at and to focus just as much on the human experience as we do on analytical data. We value people, and we are committed to treating people with dignity and respect. We first need to understand the complexities of people’s lives if we want to develop innovative solutions and ensure effective services reach those who need them, when they need them. The ability to draw on insights and to use a wide range of data and evidence in a careful and considered way is essential to this.

This Government has recently announced that we will put an extra $1.9 million into the Growing Up in New Zealand study. This highlights our continuing commitment to growing our understanding and appreciation of the drivers of family and whānau well-being. The Growing Up in New Zealand study was previously the responsibility of the Families Commission, and the study will continue to thrive and provide essential data and insights, now and in the future, under the Ministry of Social Development. The Growing Up in New Zealand study is the country’s largest longitudinal study of child development. Since it began in 2008, more than 50 million pieces of data have been collected from more than 6,800 families. Our decision to restore funding comes at a critical point where, for the first time, the study is hearing from the children themselves. I’m sure we can all agree that hearing the voice of children will make powerful contributions to the way Government policy makers and service providers understand how to meet the needs of diverse New Zealand families and whānau.

Not only is data and evidence essential to decision making in Government and the formation of policy, it is also indispensable to the ongoing monitoring and evaluation of our progress. We are continually looking to improve solutions for families and whānau, and this requires collaboration across Government agencies and strong partnerships with non-governmental organisations and communities.

Fortunately, the need for effective research and evaluation of programmes is now a common part of core processes across Government. Likewise, agencies are expected to work with each other on investing for social well-being, and the State Services Commission is working on assisting agencies to work better together. Thanks to the Families Commission, in conjunction with the Aotearoa New Zealand Evaluation Association, we also have practice guidelines and tools to encourage more effective use of research. This is an effective resource that will continue to guide data use across Government. These tools and practice guidelines regularly support decision-making processes, especially those involving Budget initiatives. All Ministers, including myself, value this information, and these tools and guidelines will continue to apply once the commission is disestablished.

Another initiative that supports this Government’s focus on well-being for our families is the recent establishment of the social well-being board by the State Services Commission. The board is intended to “drive and support Public Service effort on the Government’s social well-being agenda.” The board will be made up of an independent chair and heads of departments and chief executives, with the role of supporting the social well-being Cabinet committee through policy advice, resource allocation, reprioritisation over time, and performance of investments and work streams.

There are many agencies and non-governmental organisations ready and willing to commit to the important task of advocating for families and whānau. I am confident that this Government has the ability to inform, design, and invest in our social services so that they are effective for the people who need to access support. We already have a better understanding and appreciation of how diverse New Zealand families and whānau can be, and we know more about what drives well-being in families and whānau. I do want to acknowledge the Families Commission for their invaluable contribution to this, but we also need to recognise that the social sector is very different to in 2004. We, as a Government, must change to reflect this.

As you are aware, all of the commission’s key functions have already, effectively, been transferred to the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Social Development, and the Social Investment Agency. We’re continuing to meet the deadline that the previous Government set, and the Ministry of Social Development is working closely with the social policy evaluation and research unit (SuPERU) over key aspects of the disestablishment process. They are taking great care to preserve the considerable amount of useful, valuable, and meaningful information the commission produced over many years.

Everyone involved in this process is working hard to ensure an orderly and seamless transition for stakeholders and remaining Families Commission staff. I’d like to give my sincere thanks to the SuPERU board chair, Len Cook, and board members, Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, Dame Tariana Turia, Jo-anne Wilkinson, and Haami Piripi, and all SuPERU staff. Their hard work and commitment to New Zealand families and whānau will not be forgotten.

I’m confident that this bill will improve the effectiveness and efficiencies of social science research and advocacy for the interests of families and whānau. More importantly, this bill supports the Government’s united focus on improving people’s well-being, success, and ability to reach their full potential. I commend this bill to the House.

Hon LOUISE UPSTON (National—Taupō): I want to start by thanking the Minister for Social Development, the Hon Carmel Sepuloni, for continuing this important work and for recognising the huge significance of the use of data and evidence to change people’s lives, and for supporting the incredibly important work of the Social Investment Agency. I will come back to that.

Madam Deputy Speaker—as we transition to Mr Assistant Speaker—I do also want to put on record my thanks to the Hon Anne Tolley for starting this process. So for those of you who have just tuned into this debate on this third reading, this is, of course, legislation that repeals the Families Commission Act of 2003.

There have been a number of changes in this space of very important research into children and into families. It was originally the Families Commission, and then, over time, the change was made for it to become the social policy evaluation and research unit, or what we commonly called SuPERU. Then, as the previous Government geared towards social investment as the vehicle for changing people’s lives, the Social Investment Agency was born. So as a result of a number of these changes, it’s important to have legislation that repeals the initial legislation and is then responsible for the decommissioning of the Families Commission and of SuPERU.

But I do want to reassure members that the critical work that’s been started—a lot of the research that’s been undertaken—hasn’t been lost; it will be held. It is really critical in terms of the ongoing work that this House has committed to, that the former Government committed to, and that the new Government has picked up, which is about improving the lives of all New Zealanders, with a particular focus on families and children.

I wanted to talk just a little bit about one of the pieces of work that is being handed over and that the Ministry of Social Development will now look after, and that is the Growing Up in New Zealand study. We should be particularly proud in New Zealand of this study, because it is seen as world-leading research.

It was started in 2008—7,000 children and their families have been studied. One of the things that’s unique about it was that it started with work with parents before the children were born. It’s looking at a range of family dynamics, recognising that what was once a nuclear family is quite different now. It looks at the natural parents, subsequent partners of parents that are involved in the children’s lives, and it focuses on the children before birth, at nine months, at two years, and at four years. The intention of the study is to follow those children and those families until the age of 21.

There are 16 Government departments that are involved in that study—involved in terms of the provision of data—and the research and the interviews that are undertaken provide critical guidance for the Government of the day for policy making and decisions for New Zealand families from one end of New Zealand to the other. So I’m very pleased that the Government has continued with the Social Investment Agency and that the Government has continued with the place-based initiatives. Place-based initiatives are a really important piece of work that really looks at local communities and social issues or challenges within those communities, and hands them more of the decision making, using data and using evidence to be able to have the greatest impact on some of the very challenging areas that affect local families, and children in particular.

So I’m thrilled that the Government has picked up that work that was started under our time, that the Growing Up in New Zealand study is going to be carried on under the responsibility of the Ministry of Social Development, and that the place-based initiatives, which embrace social investment around changing lives and creating opportunities, will be continued.

I do want to finish my contribution not only by thanking the current Families Commissioner, Len Cook, but former Families Commissioners who’ve been involved in really critical work setting up the next phase of opportunities for New Zealand children, and also, too, the SuPERU board members, Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, Dame Tariana Turia, Jo-anne Wilkinson, and Haami Piripi. They have done substantial work for New Zealand. We owe them a huge gratitude for what they have brought to our conversations around social investment and around improving the lives of every young New Zealander. Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker.

Hon PEENI HENARE (Associate Minister for Social Development): Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. Thank you for this opportunity. I stand to support my colleague and a great Minister the Hon Carmel Sepuloni in the promotion of this bill in the third reading. For fear of repetition, I’ll keep this contribution relatively brief, but I want to touch on a couple of points that I think need slightly more extension, given the great comments and great contribution by the Minister.

The social landscape in Aotearoa New Zealand is definitely changing. It’s fluid, it moves, and the Government must move with it too. I take another point that the Minister mentioned, around community involvement, engagement, and co-design. All of these fantastic opportunities afforded to people who are working in the social space in Aotearoa New Zealand can only be built when, actually, the reset button has been pushed.

I want to support the words of the House that have extended congratulations to the Families Commission and the good work that they’ve done, and to the social policy evaluation and research unit (SuPERU) and the good research that they’ve done over many years. Can I highlight one particular piece of work: that SuPERU actually, finally, stepped out of the box of working with only the concept of family and actually extending more into what whānau meant. I think that’s a fundamental shift that was important. It was timely. In fact, it was overdue. So I want to acknowledge in particular that piece of work undertaken by SuPERU, and echo the words of the Hon Louise Upston in her comments, talking about how those bodies of research will continue to serve this Government and Governments into the future around the decisions we make, in this particular space, for the well-being of families and, of course, communities far and wide.

I’ll stop there. I think much has been said, but I just want to stand in support of the Minister, the Hon Carmel Sepuloni, and commend this bill to the House.

Hon ALFRED NGARO (National): Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. There are many sayings that people say, but finally the time has come for a bill that started off with good intentions to then come to its end, and it’s lived a life in which it set out a line of inquiry that made us ask the questions around the importance of family. It made us ask about the importance around family and whānau, and I think that’s important to what this bill intended back in 2003.

As members have known, throughout our debate in the House at the first and second readings, committee stage, and now at the third reading, we have known the history of this and where it’s come from. So it started off as a coalition agreement to set up a commissioning agent such as the Families Commission, which not only would just be an advocate for all of those things that are important, but also would begin to ask the questions around policy and how we then could develop research, inquiry, and data that would inform policy in a way that would create better outcomes for our family and our whānau as well.

So again, with the other speakers so far, I absolutely agree that its time has come. It’s lived a good life. It’s succeeded in its intent, and now it’s evolved into other areas. I want to acknowledge the fact that now that has spread out, and some of the residual responsibilities have gone through to the Ministry of Justice, to the Ministry of Social Development, and also to the Social Investment Agency, as well. That becomes important because, now, it’s embedding itself.

I want to acknowledge some of the work over that period of time, and in particular the Families and Whānau Status Report. As has been mentioned, there’s the importance of being able to understand the complexity, the diversity, of family and whānau, and also how, in a sense, that can again inform some of the policy development in Government as well. I also want to acknowledge the Family Violence Clearinghouse and how that’s been important. So, it’s a cross-agency data set that allows for all of those stakeholders that are involved in dealing with the issues around family violence so that they can be better informed to be able to then make their decisions on what sort of practice at the front line would be important as well. So I want to acknowledge that work that has happened.

What I would like to do, in closing off my speech, is, in a sense, to still hope that as this transfers over, as it evolves into the different roles of the different ministries, the important aspect of the line of inquiry and the social investment understanding and thinking will continue. The reason for that is that part of that approach was about, first of all, holding the line of accountability to our Government departments. That’s what the intent was when it first began, first of all.

We cannot ask of others what we haven’t asked of ourselves. That was the intent of this, and I do want to acknowledge the Rt Hon Bill English, because it was that approach that he took to the public sector—that if we’re going to go out and we’re going to have an approach of looking for changes and outcomes that are better for our family and our whānau in our communities, let’s first of all hold the mirror to ourselves. So social investment was, first of all, to ask the question of us, of a Government and Government departments, as to how, in a sense, it’s not only procuring services of support, but also how it actually conducts its roles of responsibilities and its duty of care, and I think that’s really important. I hope that that continues, and all indications are that it will.

What that does is it’s not afraid to actually reflect the truth that sometimes even our own systems are at fault for some of the conditions that have happened to some of our family and whānau as well. I think that that’s critically important. It asks the question around social investment that for all that we invest, how do we know that we are making a difference? It may seem like a simple question to ask, but when that was asked initially almost 10 years ago, the answer was that people didn’t know. I hope that what this will do is ensure that we continue to ask those tough questions, those hard questions, as well.

The other thing that I think is really important is around the fact that when we talk about measurements—and just recently we’ve been having submissions talking about the aspect of how do we measure, whether it be poverty or other areas of hardship, income and material—what’s also emerged out of this is the aspect of what we actually use as forms of measurement. The concern that’s been raised—which those of us, even on this side, would also raise as a concern—is that there are times when we use a deprivation index. In other words, we measure things by the things that we don’t have. Where a number of community providers and others have actually started to question that, we need to also ensure that we use a strength-based approach. In other words, sometimes cultural constructs for certain communities have a different way of measuring well-being, and it may not just be income and it may not just be material hardship.

There are other ways to be able do that, and in that line I want to be able acknowledge the work of the commissioning agencies around Whānau Ora, because they have developed the work which is in line with the aspect of family and whānau and how we report on that—in a sense, what do they consider as being the well-being conditions or indicators of well-being as well? And it’s in line with the work that’s come out of the Families Commission. So I want to acknowledge that. I hope that that continues and that we will have the ability to be able to be balanced in the inquiry between the measurements that we have, the targets and indicators, so that we have both the aspect of using the deprivation index, because that becomes important—but at the same time too, it balances that with a more strength-based approach. I think that’s critically important.

So, with those comments I too, like others, want to commend the bill to the House. But, more importantly, again I want to thank those who, over a period of time since 2003, have previously been commissioners, CEOs, managers, researchers, office staff—everyone that’s been involved, employed, contracted, and supported to ensure that the work of the Families Commission was not only the advocate for those things that are important but also the supporter of research and data that would better inform our Government departments and our agencies as well. So I commend this bill to the House.

Hon TRACEY MARTIN (Minister for Children): Kia ora, Mr Assistant Speaker. Thank you very much. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak on the repeal of the Families Commission Act of 2003.

The Families Commission Act Repeal Bill is a very small bill. As the Minister for Social Development has referred to it, it is a matter of process. It will, in effect, be repealing the Families Commission Act of 2003, which will disestablish the Families Commission that has operated as the social policy evaluation and research unit (SuPERU), which was an autonomous Crown agency. As the previous Government established the Social Investment Board and the Social Investment Agency, they made the Families Commission and SuPERU obsolete, hence the need for this small piece of legislation to make its way through the House.

I have found it very interesting how soon we forget the colleagues that sat with us, so can I just acknowledge the Hon Peter Dunne. This was a piece of work that the Hon Peter Dunne brought to this House. He hasn’t been gone that long and he was a colleague of those on the other side, but nobody has mentioned his name so far this evening. I think that is a shame. Each one of us comes here to do the best we can do with the time that we have, so I acknowledge the Hon Peter Dunne and the service he did in this House.

The other comment I would make is we have heard from the Opposition members today regarding this bill that they hope that there will be a continuation of the social investment policy that the previous Government put into place, and they sounded very optimistic for that. I think they didn’t listen to Minister Sepuloni’s speech very closely when she rose to do the first speech in this particular reading, where she talked about social well-being. There is quite a difference—a distinct difference—between the social investment policy that the previous Government put into place that has required this bill to pass through to disestablish the Families Commission, and what is actually the policy of this current Government, which is around social well-being. The social investment policy was very, very much based on deficit thinking, as opposed to the social well-being model, which is a much more positive and aspirational concept. Both are based upon data, there is no doubt.

What the Hon Alfred Ngaro spoke about with regard to making sure that Government agencies, Government Ministers, and Government themselves are held to account around the use of taxpayers’ money—to make sure that when we use taxpayers’ dollars, it has a positive effect and a positive impact on the taxpayers’ lives themselves—is certainly well understood by this side of the House. However, if we look at just an example of how that data was being used—just around decile funding, for example, or operational funding inside our schools—the social investment policy that led to the disestablishment of this particular organisation used several markers to decide a funding model for five- and six-year-olds that had absolutely nothing to do with the needs of the individual child.

So the investment model was certainly based around a risk analysis on what the cost of that human being would be to the country as a whole, as opposed to the social well-being model that this Government works on: what is the support that our citizens need or that our children need to be the best they can be inside our society?

Matt King: CPTPP—same thing. Same thing.

Hon TRACEY MARTIN: What is it that is the equity funding that they require? And, Mr King, I understand that you don’t like spending money on some of our poorest citizens, but that is not the driver behind this particular side of the House. So while some people may sit up in one of the poorest areas of our nation—quite comfortably, obviously—and don’t feel that it is the well-being of all our citizens and that it is equity funding for all our citizens that we should be focusing on, that is not what this side of the House focuses on.

So I commend the bill to the House. I commend the bill because the Act no longer has a purpose. I do want to honour the Hon Peter Dunne. This side of the House has picked up what I believe was his true intent in setting up the research body: to provide answers to what was needed, and to make sure that we understood what was needed to create the most optimum well-being for our citizens, from our young people through to our seniors. Kia ora.

JO HAYES (National): Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. I’m pleased to stand to take a call in the third reading of the Families Commission Act Repeal Bill. There are a few people that I want to acknowledge. I want to acknowledge the Hon Anne Tolley, who started the work progressing through the disestablishment of the Families Commission and then the social policy evaluation and research unit, or SuPERU. I also want to acknowledge the Government for carrying on with this piece of legislation and working through the disestablishment of the Families Commission, and for picking up the work that started under the National-led Government around social investment.

Whatever you call it—social investment, social well-being—it’s all about helping children, helping those most vulnerable and at risk in moving from one space to a better space. The work that was done around the Growing Up in New Zealand reports, up to age 21, has been invaluable in being able to inform the progress and process forward for social investment.

Yes, I heard the Minister’s speech as well, talking about the social well-being approach, and giving power back to the people and letting the people actually determine their future, and bringing out the potential of those families. I guess a little dig in here is that is very similar to what the outcomes for Whānau Ora are: being able to empower families to be able to determine what their future will be, and to bring out potential within that family group, as small or as wide as it can go. As I sat and I listened to the speech in my office, I started to wonder whether or not the Government had really thought about some of their investment strategies around the Budget.

I want to make mention of the Rt Hon Bill English because, contrary to what many people think about Bill, he was very caring. He really was concerned about the social situation of young children and children at risk. Some people might say that you can research to death—you know, what is it; the “analysis to paralysis” - type thing—but the work that went on in developing the social investment approach did inform the Rt Hon Bill English about the state of where children at risk really was and what were the key areas, the key indicators—I suppose they would call them—of children at risk, and why they were at risk, and what we could do as a Parliament to move forward and to help them and support them to move from the state that they’re in to a better, more productive state.

There were certain areas around, you know, the mother’s qualifications, etc., and we know that research has said that a mother’s qualifications actually have a lot to do with the success of her children. I’m one of those. My mother was well-educated and, consequently, we were all well-educated as her children. That was her drive. I know that I’m digressing away from the bill, but those are some of the aspects within a social investment approach, a social well-being approach—what have you.

So without any further ado, I just wanted to get across some of the thinking that I have in my head around where to from here. I do stand and I do commend this bill to the House, and, hopefully, we will see some more great things that have been informed by a National-led Government as we move forward. Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker.

JAN LOGIE (Green): Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. I rise to take a short call on behalf of the Green Party on the third reading of the Families Commission Act Repeal Bill. The Green Party, along with every other party in this House, is supporting this piece of legislation, which is quite a specific piece of legislation. It’s not seeking to change the world; it is just seeking to repeal the Families Commission Act of 2003 and to disestablish the Families Commission and transfer the residual assets and liabilities to the ministry.

The Green Party, while we’ve heard a lot of support for the work of the Families Commission in the House this evening and in previous speeches—and I would like to note my appreciation for their work, and note that we were pleasantly surprised in the Green Party to see some really positive work come out of the Families Commission. We didn’t support the establishment of the commission in the beginning, in 2002, and believed that the work could have been done within existing ministries. We would have preferred to have seen the money—the $28 million that it was at that time—being spent on specific initiatives to improve child well-being and address child poverty.

I still stand by that, actually, because we know that this should be core business for all of our ministries, to think of the well-being of our children and our families and to support the delivery of those great initiatives. What else are our Government social agencies there for if it’s not to do that, as well as support other people, obviously? So it is interesting to see this come full circle, now, to a point of consensus across this House that, actually, yes, this is core business of Government agencies and isn’t something that should be put into a separate agency, out on its own.

However, over time, I do want to acknowledge that the Families Commission—while there was some concern at the time when it was established that it might have been a force that was being set up to try and limit our understanding of what a family is and to be able to push a particular agenda that didn’t match the diversity of our families within Aotearoa, in actual fact, the reality was, pleasantly, opposite to that. In fact, the commission championed recognition of different family structures and the diversity within our communities, and I really do want to thank them for that work. It has been really important for us as a country, and I am sure and have confidence now that that work will continue.

In the Social Services and Community Committee, there were people who did raise concerns to make sure that the work that was being sheltered under the social policy evaluation and research unit would continue, and it’s great to see that it will, within agencies. To single out the Family Violence Clearinghouse, their work will be now sponsored by the Ministry of Justice and will of course continue, because it is vitally important that we have a group with the specific role of having oversight of research around family violence and to disseminate that information. There’s also been a lot of discussion around the Hub and the Social Investment Agency in this House tonight. That role, too, will continue.

I do want to just say that I’ve heard some speakers from the National Party saying, tonight, “Data, data, where would we be without data?”, as if we can’t make good decisions without a social investment approach—that we’ve never had such a thing as research that informed our decision making and that data could somehow fix people or fix families. I just want to put on record that I really just think that’s—I’ve got a word that’s coming to my mind that’s probably not parliamentary, so I’m going to try and find another one. I think that’s rubbish. There—that’s a much better description. Actually, what we know works is—actually, we’ve got really, really good social science around how we relate to people and what’s going to help families and people heal.

Kieran McAnulty: What word were you thinking? Was it “useless”? Was it “hopeless”? Was it “pointless”?

JAN LOGIE: No, it was much worse than that, I’m sorry. “Pointless”, I was hearing coming from there. “Pointless”—but no, it was worse than that, and I’m going to restrict myself to “rubbish”.

Kieran McAnulty: It was “terrible”, wasn’t it?

JAN LOGIE: Oh, it was worse than “terrible”, I’m sorry—yes.

We’ve got good research, and I do just want to point out the inconsistency where we were hearing from the National Party that it was all about the data and the data informed the decision making. That is the party that oversaw record levels of homelessness in the country. That should have shown up in the research. That is the party that shut down funding for home insulation when the data told us that that was an economically, socially, and environmentally smart initiative. So it just seemed like it was a lot of window dressing, to me, to actually abdicate responsibility for making good decisions to support our communities and families.

I am pleased to see that on this side of the House, we’re getting back to actually dealing with the problems and admitting that they’re problems, and putting plans in place to deal with them rather than the hiding behind—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! Can we have less of the cross-kōrero going on, please. I can’t hear.

JAN LOGIE: And it was such a good speech that everyone would want to hear, wouldn’t they? Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker—amazing. So, on that note, I think I will finish my contribution and just say that the Green Party are happy to support this piece of legislation.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Before I give the next call, can I say to Mr King and Mr McAnulty that the use of the personal pronoun “you” brings the Speaker into the debate, whether it’s in the speech or within interjections across the House—please cease.

MAUREEN PUGH (National): Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. I’ll rise tonight to take a very short call on the Families Commission Act Repeal Bill in its third reading. The bill will be repealing the Families Commission Act of 2003, and it does, in effect, disestablish the Families Commission, which has been operating as the social policy evaluation and research unit (SuPERU). I did take the opportunity during the second reading speech and through the committee stage to acknowledge the work of the board, who did a sterling job—a very capable board—and thank them for their time and the expertise that they brought to this discussion.

It’s just another step forward in some more efficiencies and effectiveness within the social investment system that was established by the National Party, and the establishment of the social investment board and the Social Investment Agency has now made SuPERU obsolete, hence the need for this bill.

It’s certainly heartening to see the National Party see more of its hard work being dealt with in this House, and especially so far up the Order Paper. It’s very nice to see that it is being dealt with and that we are tying up these loose ends. I’m not sure what that tells us, actually—maybe it’s just that there’s no other legislation of significance for the Government to be sending to the House. But, anyway, we’re happy to help in filling up the Order Paper.

This is a very small bill, and it’s simply wrapping up the loose ends. Because SuPERU is being disestablished, it does require the repeal of the Families Commission Act of 2003. Most of the work, as we’ve already heard tonight—all of the work, in fact—has been either delegated or commissioned by other entities. For instance, the contract for Growing Up in New Zealand and the Superu Children and Families Research Fund has been transferred over to the Ministry of Social Development.

The bill has been through the select committee process. The Social Services and Community Committee dealt with this and recommended, in fact, that the bill be passed with no alterations. There was unanimous support that there was no new evidence, and so the bill will be passed without any changes at all. So there’s nothing contentious in this legislation.

I congratulate the work of the former Minister for Social Development Anne Tolley for the vision and the work that she led to bring about the social investment approach, and I do look forward to the results of that work manifesting in a brighter future and more opportunities for vulnerable Kiwis. I take pleasure in commending this bill to the House.

Hon AUPITO WILLIAM SIO (Minister for Pacific Peoples): I am pleased to take a call on this. Firstly, I want to acknowledge the Minister the Hon Carmel Sepuloni for the leadership that she is providing around the protection of families. The Families Commission Act Repeal Bill—this is the bill to improve the effectiveness and efficiencies of social science research and advocacy for the interests of families and whānau. This Government has a collective and united focus on improving people’s well-being, success, and ability to reach their full potential. This bill recognises that investing in families is an integral part of this Government, and we’ve got a good mechanism in place to ensure that attention is given to the needs and interests of families and whānau.

Just reflecting on where we are today and the diversity of families and the make-up of families, I’m proud to be associated with a Government that takes families seriously and recognises the plight that many of our families are undergoing at the moment. I’m pleased also that the Minister, in her wisdom, had fought hard to make sure that the longitudinal research continues to be funded, where we’re able to observe what has happened to families that have been researched, and that evidence is really important. I also want to acknowledge the fact that the Hon Carmel Sepuloni has also been a strong advocate in making sure that the Families Package, which comes into force on 1 July, is a package that is going to help families.

Often, we talk about children living in poverty, but children don’t live by themselves; they live in family units. They live in a variety of family units: sometimes single parents, single dads, single mums, and sometimes these young children see a different set of parents coming through their front doors. I know that, having met up with community organisations on the ground who are working at the coalface of helping families, they see the complexity of those particular issues, particularly in some family units. It’s no longer the simple family units that we’ve been accustomed to; it’s a variety of complex family units, and some young people will see different partners of their mothers or their fathers coming in through the door. That has an impact on how those children are raised. Sometimes, one of the parents might be somebody that will harm the other partner, and all of that impacts on families.

What I’m really pleased about is that some community organisations have got it. They’re working really, really hard, with support from this Government, on models that primarily are focused on the well-being of those families—strength-based. One particular project is out in South Auckland, in Papatoetoe. The well-being model is strength-based, so that instead of looking at the risk or instead of looking at the harm or the deficit aspects of that particular family, this particular model looks at the family environment, the educational environment, the health environment, and the justice environment, and determines the strength for each of those particular environments. By so doing, they are able identify how to help and support that particular individual child or that particular family.

As I said, I don’t need to speak any further than I have. I just want to acknowledge the fact that this legislation is now at its third reading. I acknowledge the leadership of the Minister, the Hon Carmel Sepuloni, for leading this and proceeding it through the House and getting it done, because if it was that other lot, we would probably be waiting for another year.

NICOLA WILLIS (National): I rise in support of the Families Commission Act Repeal Bill. I want to acknowledge, for the New Zealanders who are tuned in to Parliament this evening, that this is an example of where the Government and the Opposition agree on something and we vote together to pass good legislation through the House. I want to acknowledge that this is a piece of legislation that National initiated because we could see that it was time for the chapter on the Families Commission to close and for a new book to be opened. And so, when we think about what that new work is and where the closure of the Families Commission will take us, I think the first thing we acknowledge is that families remain at the heart of the work of Government, and always should, but that we don’t need a special agency to do that work. It is fundamentally our job as parliamentarians to ensure that the impact on families and the well-being of families are at the forefront of our policy decisions.

I want to reflect on the Social Investment Agency, which is one of the agencies which will take over where the Families Commission left off, and I want to acknowledge the tentative moves by the Government to continue the work of that unit. Now, while criticisms have been hurled from the other side about the social investment approach, that unit still exists and its work programme continues. I think all of us would do well to remember why its work continues. As the Rt Hon Bill English once said, “For too long as parliamentarians, for too long as Governments have we been prepared to simply service misery, to accept that there is misery in our families and our communities, to spend money on it, to invest money in it, and to praise ourselves for our good intentions.” Well, good intentions aren’t good enough. The work that matters is the work that actually makes a difference and changes lives, and that is, fundamentally, what social investment is about.

In a similar vein, we have the place-based initiatives, which will continue once the Families Commission is repealed. You know what the Rt Hon Bill English used to say about these? He used to say, “We know their names. We do not need to spend all this time funding separate agencies, separate initiatives, and separate programmes to go off and solve this problem or that problem. Actually, there are people in our community who we know need our help and who we can do better for. We shouldn’t have eight cars up their driveway; instead, we should have one car up their driveway.” So it is that approach that says “Let’s invest where we most need to, where we can most make a difference” that we, on this side of the House, dearly want to see continued for the good of New Zealanders.

Similarly, that is the work of Whānau Ora, and so we are disappointed that that approach to family well-being hasn’t had the emphasis it could have in the Budget.

Hon Peeni Henare: Has the member visited a Whānau Ora commissioning agency?

NICOLA WILLIS: And that’s for you to sort out isn’t it, Peeni Henare? I think that that is for the Minister to sort out. I don’t want to be there when you’re having those debates in your Cabinet. I’m sure they’ll get heated, but look, you know—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! We’re not debating the Budget. Come back to the bill.

NICOLA WILLIS: I’m sorry—I’m sorry, Mr Assistant Speaker.

So when it comes to Whānau Ora, that is an initiative which is about family well-being, which is work that will continue once the Families Commission is repealed, and it is an acknowledgment that after that commission has gone, good work for families can continue.

I want to briefly touch on the Growing Up in New Zealand study, because, again, that is work that was once overseen by the Families Commission and that will now continue under other agencies. Here we have a study that provides us detailed information about what sorts of interventions can make a difference in the lives of children. Here we have a study that gives us information about everything from language to the whānau living arrangements, to what goes on in the first thousand days of a child’s life. I want to commend to this House that it is incumbent on all of us to read that research and to understand that research, so that we don’t just come up with policies that seem like a good idea, but come up with policies that actually make a difference to people’s lives. That’s fundamentally what the work of social investment can be once the Families Commission is gone.

Like other speakers before me, I want to acknowledge Sir Peter Gluckman, Dame Tariana Turia, Haami Piripi, and Jo-anne Wilkinson, who worked on the Families Commission—[Bell rung]—and I commend this bill to the House—sorry, I still have a minute to go.

So most families, in conclusion, do do a great job. They seek out opportunity and they grasp it, but there are some families who need more help. They know that both sides of this House want better for them, but it is this side of the House that is fundamentally endorsing a social investment approach. We would encourage members opposite to continue that approach. Thank you.

PRIYANCA RADHAKRISHNAN (Labour): Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. I rise to take a very short call at the third reading of the Families Commission Act Repeal Bill. This is a very straightforward bill. Basically, what it does is revoke the Families Commission Act 2003, which will then disestablish the commission. It also allows for processes to manage the consequences of that disestablishment.

I think I’ve spoken about this bill in its previous readings, as well, and have gone into what it will do and how some of the work will be carried on. Colleagues have also gone into that this evening, so I’ll keep mine brief. I just want to acknowledge that the work of the Families Commission over the years has been vast and has been very valuable. In my former life, I’ve had a fair bit to do with the Families Commission, so I just want to take this opportunity to thank the current commissioner, Len Cook, but also former commissioners—including our own former Labour MP Dr Rajen Prasad, as well—board members of the Families Commission, and staff over the years who’ve worked tirelessly on so many pieces of work that have been led by the Families Commission.

I also take this opportunity to thank Ministers on both sides of the House who’ve been involved with the commission and the work of the commission, and also the work that has gone into this bill. I want to thank the current Minister, the Hon Carmel Sepuloni, for her leadership with regard to this bill, and also in terms of more broadly improving social well-being for New Zealanders. With that, I commend this bill to the House. Thank you.

MATT KING (National—Northland): The Government will be happy to hear that I’ll only have a short contribution to this. We support the bill because it’s our work—it’s our work. But I will acknowledge the Hon Carmel Sepuloni for taking this bill through the House. I can see it’s in her blood. She’s passionate about it; it’s patently obvious. So I’d like to acknowledge her for that work.

I also want to refer to Jan Logie. She talked about house insulation. I’m not going to acknowledge her in a nice way, but she talked about house insulation and she boo-hooed data-driven—and, I thought to myself, isn’t that the irony of that, in that we, in consultation with the Greens and working with the Greens, insulated more homes than any other Government. So if she wants to go into coalition with us in 2020, she’d better sharpen up.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): The member needs to come to the bill.

MATT KING: OK, I’m back to the bill—back to the bill. So I make no apologies for having data-driven decisions made—no apologies whatsoever. The social investment policy is all about data. I hear “social investment” and then I hear the name change. The Government call it social well-being. That’s a bit like TPP and CPTPP—same thing. Just add a couple of things, change it around a bit—same thing. So I’m really happy to hear that you’re carrying that on—really happy to hear.

Look, this social investment approach—or call it social well-being. I relate a story from many years ago where I wish that this policy had been in.

Greg O’Connor: War stories.

MATT KING: Yeah, a war story there, Greg O’Connor. Some the data that we got from that longitudinal study from Otago was if you’re a single parent or alcoholic, if there was violence in the family—all those risk indicators—the high likelihood is that that person’s going to end up going to jail. That’s data—you know, that’s a data-driven approach. I remember a young lad that was six or seven years old and he was living with his dad, who was an alcoholic, and a violent alcoholic at that. He used to lock his boy in the dog kennel in the back of his ute and go to the pub for four hours at a time. We didn’t know that at the time, but what chance did he have of ever having a life? He started out stealing, breaking into cars, and doing burglaries, and he ended up doing major robberies, and now he’s doing serious time for armed robberies. So the social investment, social well-being, data-driven model would, hopefully, intervene and recognise that he was a high risk for those risk factors and would intervene at an earlier stage and, hopefully, turn his life around and have a better outcome.

So we support this bill. We support the social investment - social well-being policy. I’ve said enough. I commend it to the House.

GREG O’CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu): It gives me great pleasure to be the final speaker on this Families Commission Act Repeal Bill, having followed some very accomplished speakers, one of which was the Hon Alfred Ngaro with a saying which he shared with the House. I’ve gone through Google and many other sources of research available to me and I haven’t been able to find it, but perhaps the saying you were looking for that is very pertinent to this bill is “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”. That’s from Yogi Berra. That is pertinent to this bill because, to a certain extent, we have come to the end of the natural life of this bill.

When one looks at the legislation, there are some beautiful words, some decisive words—if only all pieces of legislation could be so concise. If you go to Part 2, clause 8, “Families Commission disestablished” is the headline. The wording is “The Commission is disestablished.” Well, that’s the sort of finality that we would like to understand—that those who put this together will want to know that where we go from here, good things came from that bill, and there is always some good that comes out of any situation.

One of the very good things about this, of course, was the Growing Up in New Zealand study that the Hon Louise Upston and others have mentioned. I was privileged enough, as was the Hon Louise Upston, to have a briefing at a select committee today on the Growing Up in New Zealand study. The context of the study couldn’t be more pertinent, because what we were discussing was another bill—I think I’m permitted to say, without straying too far, the other bill we were talking about was the Child Poverty Reduction Bill—and the need to have good facts, good research, around that. So much of what would come out of the Growing Up in New Zealand study—this study where we had, of course, 7,000 children born in 2009 and 2010. I probably should also mention that this study was also conceived in 2007 and was—very wisely—picked up by the incoming National Government in 2008. They do say “Success has a thousand fathers; failure is an orphan”, so we will all take the success of this good study. That’s another saying, Mr Ngaro, you may borrow at any stage, and there is no need to attribute that to me.

I do say, reading this—and while there is this feeling of goodwill, I don’t want to ruin the party, but the speaker Nicola Willis did talk about knowing exactly who all these people are and we’ve just got to go and find them. Well, that’s actually not strictly true, because one of the main things that came out of the study was that people, when you look at the statistics, come in and out of those 7,000. People, at different times, will be in poverty and at other times will be out. So it is not that easy to define. So it’s important that when we are having these wraparounds, we do have good research and we do make sure that there is an element of not being too narrow and focused on this, because we will miss out a lot of people that are absolutely necessary.

So as we do say goodbye to this bill—it’s not that it’s final; I know we’re not quite ready for “The Last Post” yet, but the end of the Family Commission Act Repeal Bill is very nigh—it’s a good time to actually think: what will be the legacies? I think another one will be, and certainly at the Social Services and Community Committee that was considering this—Len Cook was there, and you saw the passion that man had for this and what he’d actually put into this. I have since seen him, and I wanted to know that that man was actually going to be in another job, in another position, where he’s going to use what he got out of this, and I’m very happy to see that he is going to be doing that.

I think of the staff that have worked there since 2008 and the knowledge that they picked up, and this town being what it is, I know that they will go on in other jobs they’ll get in the public sector. I hope they’re in the public sector, because that will be the place they’ll get to use the knowledge they’ve picked up, and it will be another way that they’ll be able to disseminate that knowledge through the public sector. So it won’t die. It will live on, particularly the good parts of it.

So, once again, I’ll not belabour this point. Mr Ngaro, I don’t have any more sayings for you, but at any time you would like anything that perhaps does have a little bit more credibility, I’m happy to share. I do have a few years on you and have picked up a few of these perhaps useless, or some more useful, ones in the meantime.

But I do commend this bill to the House. It has been a great learning experience to be part of its final years, but it did impart some of its final wisdom to younger members like myself, coming in—that we will be part of the legacy of this bill. So I do commend this bill to the House.

Bill read a third time.

Bills

Social Security Legislation Rewrite Bill

In Committee

Debate resumed from 15 May.

Part 3 Obligations (continued)

Hon LOUISE UPSTON (National—Taupō): Thank you, Mr Chair. This is a really significant piece of legislation. The opportunity arose in the last Parliament to really rewrite legislation so that we ensured it was fit for purpose. It was originally written in the 1960s, so it clearly needed some significant work.

So we are on Part 3 of this piece of legislation, and I think it’s important that we look at the individual subparts in Part 3. The one that I want to talk to specifically—and I know it’s a different point than I was on before, so I do want to move on to a new section of this debate—is around the Ministry of Social Development’s (MSD’s) obligations. We have seen the significant, 500-page Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 25 tabled by the Minister already in this, and I’m wondering if the Minister has any other intentions to table further SOPs around MSD’s obligations, given the lengthy discussions and commentaries that the Minister’s made about MSD and front-line staff ensuring that beneficiaries are given everything they are entitled to. So it would be very useful if the Minister was able to take a call and outline her plans for changes to MSD’s obligations, and whether or not she will be tabling an additional SOP to change this legislation to ensure that those on benefit are supported fully.

One of the examples that I’m sure my colleagues will pick up is one of the headings under Subpart 2 in Part 3, around MSD’s obligations: “Steps to explain overseas absence rules”. This is an issue that’s come up a lot, particularly with the Government’s intention to introduce the winter energy payment, which is coming into effect on 1 July. There’s been quite a lot of confusion around what those who would automatically be receiving the winter energy payment would be required to do, but, more importantly, MSD’s obligations, because Subpart 2 is about MSD’s obligations to explain the rules relating to absence from New Zealand.

I know the Minister’s committed to ensuring that each and every person who is receiving a benefit—whether it’s the winter energy payment, sole parent benefit, or a job seeker benefit—receives every entitlement that they can get. Therefore, I am wanting to know what changes the Minister’s proposing to ensure that those receiving benefits—beneficiaries—aren’t caught out because MSD haven’t taken additional steps that they could have taken to ensure people comply with their obligations.

Part 3, of course, is about obligations. The obligations include MSD’s obligations, which are outlined in Subpart 2, which was my focus in this contribution, and then further on—which I’ll come back and talk about in another contribution to this debate—is the beneficiaries’ obligations. But I know the other side are too quick to talk about obligations on beneficiaries, so I’m specifically talking about MSD’s obligations in this, and making sure that the obligations are clear and that MSD fulfils their obligations. I want the Minister to answer for me any plans she has by tabling additional SOPs in this legislation, to ensure that this Parliament has the opportunity to scrutinise and debate these issues. I think there would be many people who would want to see additional guidance, additional obligations on MSD, to ensure that people aren’t breaking any rules because they haven’t been made aware of them fully in the first place.

I think the area around overseas absence is a very clear and specific example. In some of the Part 2 contributions, members on this side had Supplementary Order Papers relating to the winter energy payment. This, I know, is a particular issue if somebody’s receiving the winter energy payment from 1 July—which, by the way, is a lot shorter than they were anticipating it, because it was meant to come in on 1 April. What they don’t want to do, given that the colder months have already arrived—we now have snow on the Desert Road. So when the winter energy payment comes in on 1 July, are they making sure that MSD have complied with their obligations to outline to those receiving benefits, such as the winter energy payment, which is new in this rewrite, so that those who are receiving the winter energy payment understand what they have to do, so they don’t inadvertently not disclose their absences, which would of course mean a reduction in what they’re entitled to.

One of the things that is really stressful for people, and particularly for beneficiaries, is if they get a bill because they’ve had an overpayment and they’ve got to pay it back. So there is a real obligation on MSD in this section of the Social Security Legislation Rewrite Bill, which is Part 3, in Subpart 2, and it says, in clause 92, “MSD must make people affected aware of their obligations, consequences of non-compliance, and their review and appeal rights”. This is about making sure that people understand. We recognise that there’s a variety of New Zealanders who get assistance under our social security system, and the obligation is clearly on MSD to ensure that, in a sensible and practical way, people know their obligations, that they know the consequences of failure to comply with those obligations, and that in some cases there may be sanctions imposed if they don’t comply.

So this obligation on MSD is really important. Minister Carmel Sepuloni has spoken a lot in the public about sanctions and about the fact that she doesn’t believe that there should be the same level of obligations on those receiving benefits, so I’m expecting that the Minister will be making changes in Part 3, in Subpart 2, on MSD’s obligations, to ensure that people are aware of their obligations and any potential consequences of failure to comply with the beneficiaries’ obligations. We’re not talking about that part yet—that’s Subpart 3. Thank you.

Hon ALFRED NGARO (National): Thank you, Mr Chair. It’s an honour to take a call on this, Part 3 of the bill, which is entitled “Obligations”. I see that my colleague over there, Darroch Ball, is smiling because he knows what I’m about to say. One of the challenges which they probably find really difficult to work through is obligations, because when they campaigned, in their manifesto—and staying to the point around obligations—they clearly said that “We want to scrutinise the benefit system.” The other thing they also talked about, one of their manifesto platforms, was work for the dole. That didn’t work very well, did it, because the other guys didn’t like it, didn’t want it—so guess what? It ain’t going to happen. But it does talk about work-testing obligations that are really important, which is what this Part 3 talks about. It talks about the work-test obligations.

So I’m very interested. In fact, I know that on the other side, Jan Logie—she’s really keen because she was the one that was championing the fact that we would remove sanctions, but if you remove a sanction, then where do you hold people to account to the obligations? I think that’s going to be the challenge that the Minister’s going to find, actually, in this bill, maybe, with her coalition colleagues.

My point that I want to raise in particular is around this aspect of the work-test obligations that are here. There seems to be a little bit of inconsistency, but I’m sure the Minister can answer this. In Part 2, it was very clear that when one was applying for the emergency benefit—actually, in fact, it’s here in Part 2, Subpart 8. In clause 59(5)—and this has been removed—it says, “MSD may, on a case by case basis, do either or both of the following: (a) make the grant of an exceptional circumstances benefit subject to any conditions imposed … (b) impose on [the person] the work-test or work-preparation obligations”—those are being removed. So if it’s being removed because of this, I want to ask the Minister, then, there does seem to be some inconsistency around the obligations—we’re removing it from the work-test obligations in regards to applying for an emergency benefit, so how do we see the consistency of that when it applies through the rest of this bill? I’m sure that the Minister will be able to get advice from her advisers to be able to talk about that.

I want to further talk about Subpart 1 in Part 3, in regards to the failure to comply with these obligations. Here’s the point, I think, that’s going to be very difficult and challenging. In Subpart 1, clause 91(1), “Failure to comply with obligation under this Part”, it says, “A person who is subject to an obligation under this Part and who fails to comply with that obligation without good and sufficient reason is liable to a sanction”—is liable to a sanction. Now, that’s not being removed, but I think it’s going to be very interesting. I’d like to hear the speakers on the other side of the Chamber, because I know very clearly that they’ve actually said they’re opposed to sanctions. The Minister herself, as my honourable colleague Louise Upston has said, has spoken out about sanctions. So I just want to get some clarity about what’s a good sanction and what’s a bad sanction. What are sanctions that we can actually apply in this situation when a person doesn’t comply with the obligations?

The obligations that I read in Subpart 3 are not too onerous. They’re not mean-spirited. They’re not difficult, because, like all of us in this House know—and those who are now in Government and who are part of the executive know—you are held to account because it’s a taxpayer fund. It’s a fiscal responsibility that you have to ensure that you use it wisely and carefully. So how do you hold people to account when, really clearly, the Minister, who has spoken on a number of occasions, has actually said that she will actually look and, at times, oppose sanctions? So, if the Minister can talk about that in regards to what types of sanctions she will allow that we can comply with, what they would look like, and how they would be applied, I think that’s going to be important for the Minister to be able to respond to that, and that includes that as well.

If we move further down, in Subpart 1, clause 92 reads, “MSD must make people affected aware of their obligations, consequences of non-compliance, and their review and appeal rights”. I guarantee we’re not going to hear very many speeches from the Greens. Why? Because they don’t like reading this stuff. It’s too tough.

But how tough it is when someone—we’re not talking about everyone. This is not about benefit bashing; this is purely about those who don’t comply. All of us would agree with that. There are some people, and it’s a small group, but when it gets to the point when you’ve done everything possible—you’ve informed them, you’ve met with them, and you’ve had appointments at the Work and Income office, but they get to the point where, just for the sake of it, they don’t want to—how do we ensure then that they comply, which means, in order for that to happen, according to the bill here, you would have to apply a sanction. What will that sanction look like?

I think it’s important for the Minister to be able to answer that question. I think it’s important for her to be able to respond.

Hon CARMEL SEPULONI (Minister for Social Development): I’ll take this opportunity to speak just to respond to some of the issues that’ve been raised by the Opposition members. I just want to start by reminding the Opposition that the entire bill that you have in front of you is the entire bill. It’s not a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) that’s this thick. It’s got the changes that we are making, or the amendments we are making, put into the bill because without the context, it’s very difficult to understand. So to stand up and say that we’ve given you a very thick SOP, which is this SOP 25, is very disingenuous because we know that is the entire Social Security Legislation Rewrite Bill with the amendments in it. So I am just clarifying that and, hopefully, someone remembers it.

I also want to just say—it’s been brought up by the two speakers so far tonight—that this section’s about obligations, and questions have been asked of us about our intentions with respect to sanctions in this rewrite bill. Well, I just want to remind the Opposition that the SOP that we’ve got up on the rewrite is policy-neutral, so we’re not making any changes to the current sanction regime. However, we have publicly stated that as part of the welfare overhaul, we will be looking to assess the sanctions that are in place, and we are particularly interested in looking for excessive sanctions. So that’s the language that’s being used, but that’s not part of this, because this is a policy-neutral rewrite.

The one place where there are changes is where in the rewrite the previous Government were trying to impose work obligations on those receiving the emergency benefit—or, in the previous Government’s rewrite, it was going to become the exceptional circumstances benefit. So the previous Government were going to impose work obligations on those receiving that particular benefit. That’s not policy-neutral, and we had concerns—and others expressed concerns during the submissions process—because of the very nature of that particular benefit.

That particular benefit is a benefit that has the purpose of alleviating severe hardship in times of emergency. Many of the people that receive that benefit are actually over the age of 65. Many of them are grandparents or whānau caregivers, and some of them don’t qualify for other supports. So the nature of this particular benefit, in our minds, does not lend itself to the imposition of work obligations, as well as the fact that it was not a policy-neutral move by the previous Government.

So that’s why the major change in here is that we are taking out the Opposition’s expectations in the previous Government’s rewrite—if that makes sense—for there to be work obligations on that particular benefit. So it’s not changing what is currently the status quo, because this has never come into action. It was a rewrite that’s been kind of floated around here and not actually actioned, and so, therefore, there’s no real change there.

The other part to Part 3, I guess, that I should mention is that it clarifies that the cost of evidential drug tests cannot be reimbursed—

CHAIRPERSON (Adrian Rurawhe): I’m sorry to interrupt the Minister, but it is time for me to report progress.

House resumed.

Progress reported.

Report adopted.

The House adjourned at 9.56 p.m.