The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley): The House is in Committee on the Appropriation (2007/08 Estimates) Bill. The Standing Orders provide for 8 hours of debate on the estimates. Each member may have no more than two speeches of 5 minutes on each vote. The estimates debate should be relevant to the Government’s current spending plans, as contained in the Estimates of Appropriations.

As each vote is reached, a question will be put that the vote stand part. If it is the wish of the Committee, I will put the question on groups of votes by Minister until a vote is reached that members seek to debate. A separate question on this vote will then be proposed from the Chair. Should it be the wish of the Committee, a question may be proposed on two or more related votes for the purpose of debating them together. At the conclusion of the 8-hour debate, any remaining votes and the remaining provisions of the bill will be put as one question.

The Government indicates which votes are available for debate. I understand that all votes are available in order of seniority of Ministers, commencing with the Speaker’s votes. Copies of the order of votes to be considered are available at the Table.

KEITH LOCKE (Green) : On Monday of last week the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security began a hearing on the security risk certificate applied to Ahmed Zaoui way back in March 2003. It has taken well over 4 years for this hearing to begin, which is a great injustice, and I think it is largely the result of the incompetence of the Security Intelligence Service, which is the vote being discussed under this point, and the delaying tactics by that service. It is so unfortunate that Mr Zaoui is being used as a guinea pig for the security risk certificate provision of the immigration legislation, which even the Government admits is flawed and will be reviewed.

Mr Zaoui has been separated from his wife and family for 4½ years because of this delay. When the hearing began, the Prime Minister commented that it was a hearing, not a trial, and justified the secrecy around the hearing. I think that what the Prime Minister said ran contrary to what has been said by the various courts that have had hearings on the Zaoui case over the last few years. They were quite clear that full and proper standards of judicial process had to be applied to Mr Zaoui’s case, and there had to be a high standard of proof that he was really a threat to the security of New Zealand for the security risk certificate to be upheld by the Inspector-General.

In relation to the estimates, there has been a huge wastage of Security Intelligence Service resources on this whole case. Mr Zaoui has been out on bail for 2 years or so now, and he is clearly not a risk to the security of New Zealand. He has been giving lectures at universities, and is well respected as a proponent of women’s rights and of peaceful dialogue and reconciliation between the Muslim world and the West. In fact, he is probably New Zealand’s main expert on this issue, and he is recognised as such by many in academia. To think he is some sort of bomb-thrower is very strange.

One of the problems with due process in this whole question is the secrecy that has been put around the trial. It does not apply to any other judicial proceedings where the material being considered is open material. The whole first stage of the hearing being conducted by the Inspector-General last week and this week is on non-classified information—all information that at any proper judicial hearing should be open to the media and the public so we can see that justice is being done. The second stage of the hearing has another element of injustice to it, in that it will not involve Mr Zaoui and his lawyers at all; it will involve the special advocates, Stuart Grieve and Chris Morris, who have been appointed not by Zaoui and his legal team but by the Inspector-General himself and who are ultimately responsible to the Inspector-General, not Mr Zaoui. Also, once they have seen classified material in the Zaoui case their instructions are not to speak to Mr Zaoui or his legal team about it. So Mr Zaoui will know nothing of that classified information, and that is not the way an accountable justice system should work.

This is one of the issues that the Greens have expressed over the years. The problem of having a Security Intelligence Service separate from the police is that the intelligence services are much less accountable to Parliament and to the people, and they can do many wrongs behind those closed doors, whereas the police have a much more accountable system. That was an additional concern for us just a few days ago when the head of the Security Intelligence Service, Warren Tucker, said that the Security Intelligence Service would like to branch out into the issue of international criminal activity beyond the normal political dimension of the service’s work. That, to me, would create problems on two levels. One is that the work being done in the area of international crime at the moment by the police—and it is very good work; and they have all the international communications and links—is accountable through the reporting system of the police. It would not be if it were done by the Security Intelligence Service.

The accountability problem exists for the Security Intelligence Service more than for the police; also, if we had this overlap between the Security Intelligence Service and the police in international criminal activities, then in a sense the left hand would not know what the right hand was doing because two different institutions would be operating. The problem is that the Security Intelligence Service is just so secretive. In the 50 years it has existed it has not deposited any material with the New Zealand Archive. In fact, in 2005 there was another 10-year deferral of material. This secrecy contrasts with that of a partner agency in America called the Central Intelligence Agency, which is much more open. Just recently it deposited extensive files back to the period of the 1970s, even detailing assassination plots against Fidel Castro, etc., etc. The director of the Central Intelligence Agency was very open, saying that it is important that the public know some of these things so that Americans can learn from the mistakes made in the past. That does not seem to apply to this Government or to the Security Intelligence Service in that there is still such a wall of secrecy around all the Security Intelligence Service’s activities over the years. I am sure that we have much to learn.

In respect of the material the American Central Intelligence Service has come out with, I am sure there are some parallels with the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service during that same period that should also be brought to light. I am not suggesting there were any assassination plots, but other things disclosed in those 1970s US intelligence service materials—such as that they were spying on the anti - Viet Nam War movement, etc—were likely to have taken place in New Zealand, as well.

I think the other parallel is that these crimes—one could say—of the Central Intelligence Agency at that time were justified in terms of the Cold War. Today it is not the Cold War but the so-called war on terror that is used to justify all kinds of heavy-handed, often illegal, and repressive actions. We saw this yesterday in Australia when the Australian Government defied, very frontally, a judge in Australia who let Mohamed Haneef, a doctor accused of giving a SIM card to some British terrorists, out on bail. He was immediately put into a detention centre by the Government in complete defiance of the judge. The Government used the excuse that it was cancelling his visa and could put him in an immigration detention centre. So that is just an illustration of executive power against judicial power, which is the problem, I think, that bedevils the Ahmed Zaoui case as well. Through the security risk certificate procedure, it is ultimately an exercise of executive power over fair judicial power.

One of the things that most concerns me about the Zaoui case—and the Government will often say it is just going through the processes, etc., etc.—is that by the Government’s action the most virulent anti-immigration, anti-Muslim sentiments against Zaoui have been unleashed, which one can hear on talkback radio regularly. The Government might say that it would never say things as extreme as that, but by its treatment of Mr Zaoui over these years it has given the green light to that element of society to come out with those reactionary sentiments—at great cost, I think, to the liberal character of our society. I just hope that the Inspector-General, despite the deficiencies in the process that has been launched, does in the end come up with a just and humane decision.

I think one of the inhumanities of the Zaoui case is the Government saying it will not let Zaoui’s wife and family come here even for the duration of the hearing. That is inhumane, and I think is understood as such by many people in this country. Humanity should be the basis of any good Government. Zaoui’s wife and his family are being penalised. They have been separated from Mr Zaoui for 4½ years, through no fault of their own. Their only guilt is to be part of a refugee family and to be the wife and kids of Ahmed Zaoui, a man hounded from Algeria. I have seen the torture marks on him. This is a person who is a legitimate refugee, determined as such by the Refugee Status Appeals Authority. He has been mistreated around the world and tortured by the Algerian authorities, and this is his treatment

Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Acting Minister in charge of the NZ Security Intelligence Service) : I would like to respond to the member Keith Locke on a number of matters and perhaps inject a small element of fact into some of the assertions we have heard on this matter.

First of all, I deal with the issue of the archives. In fact, the member is wrong. Already some declassified documents have now been deposited with Archives New Zealand. The reason for the long delays is that working through what can be declassified is, of course, a much more difficult process for intelligence archives than for almost any other set of archives the Government has. It requires consultation with intelligence partners and takes a very, very long period of time. Initially, resources simply were not available to engage in that activity compared with the primary role of the Security Intelligence Service. Resources have now been directed to this work and the Security Intelligence Service is actively engaged with Archives New Zealand on appraisal of the service holdings, and we can expect that more information will be transferred into the archives. As the only non-archivist life member of the Archives and Records Association, let me say that I warmly welcome that fact.

Let me come to a couple of the other points made by the member. He lit upon the fact that the Security Intelligence Service is separate from the police. I was not clear whether that was supposedly a good thing or a bad thing. It seems to me to be an essential thing. It is absolutely essential that the workings of the New Zealand Police are separate from the workings of the external intelligence agency and the internal intelligence agencies—the Government Communications Security Bureau and the Security Intelligence Service—partly because of the nature of the information they have to deal with. Indeed, the director of the Security Intelligence Service referred to a potential role in crime for the service. The Government has made no decisions and has not even considered that matter, but the reality is that there is an increasing interpenetration in trans-national crime with terrorist activities. This is why the director of the Security Intelligence Service has drawn attention to the potential role of the Security Intelligence Service in that regard.

In respect of Mr Zaoui, I note that the member is utterly convinced of what the outcome should be. I place some faith in the process and do not prejudge the outcomes in that regard. Obviously, the member considers that he has more information about security matters than any other member of the House. I doubt that is true. It is a matter for the Inspector-General to determine finally whether the security risk certificate was properly issued. The member objects to the fact that counsel for Mr Zaoui are appointed by the Inspector-General and, effectively, sworn to secrecy on certain matters. That is because to do the job they have to have access to the Security Intelligence Service records. Those are not records that should be put in the public arena just so everybody who rings up talkback radio can decide whether they got it right or wrong in terms of their initial prejudices on these matters. These are classified security intelligence matters and should remain within that kind of purview, right or wrong in their judgments, rather than being released into the public arena.

I must say, I do find it strange that so many on the left regard Mr Zaoui as some kind of untrammelled, spotless hero. He separated from his wife and his children because he chose to do so. He left them and came to this country. He left them and came to this country on a false passport. He left them and came to this country on a false passport, which he destroyed. At that point, of course, it made it easier for him not to be immediately returned to some other place, because he had no legitimate travel documents. His case has been considered by other tribunals in similar countries and he has been found to be somewhat wanting, if I can put it that way, in those respects.

But in respect of the matter of the basis for the security risk certificate, that is a matter for the Inspector-General to determine, not a matter for any member of this House individually, or for the House collectively, to determine, and the Government will abide by that decision. It would be interesting to know whether Mr Locke would make the same undertaking should the decision go against the view he holds on this matter. I might say on that matter, as well, that the delays are very largely the product of the legal counsel who have been engaged by Mr Zaoui and are working on his behalf.

• Vote agreed to.

Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Leader—National) : It would be useful if the Minister of Finance could answer one question arising from the Treasury annual report. There is quite a focus in there on Treasury being designated as a problem solver in the public service. One cannot help but read Treasury’s description of what the Minister wants it to do and think that he has lost faith in the rest of the civil service, and that the Government is becoming frustrated because the civil service will not produce the solutions that an ageing and a tired Government wants to see in order to make it feel as though it is getting somewhere. Its response to that is—oddly and ironically for Labour—to designate Treasury as the lead solution agency. Well, I would like to hear from Dr Cullen as to why that is.

Dr Cullen will probably get up and say that the Government wants Treasury to find solutions. Well, the reason Treasury is having trouble finding solutions for Dr Cullen is that he has created so much confusion and complexity for himself in his economic management. Let us look at the attempt over the last 6 or 8 months to try to absolve the Labour Government from any responsibility for the highest interest rates in the developed world and a record exchange rate. It started about 8 months ago, I think—I cannot remember exactly how many months ago—when Dr Cullen started to say that we needed other tools to assist monetary policy to belt a rising housing market. With some disappointment, I noted that the Governor of the Reserve Bank appeared to use the same kind of rhetoric. The Reserve Bank is independent and should be at arm’s length from the Minister, but between the two of them they have now managed to sow a paddock of confusion about what the Reserve Bank is focused on, and about what Dr Cullen thinks are the actions that a sensible and well-managed Government could take regarding the economy.

Dr Cullen needs to understand that many New Zealanders are not fooled by the elegant crafting of his own words. They have seen the sideshows of the last 6 months for what they are: the result of a Government that now faces the accumulated results of its economic management since it has been in office. Those results are not pretty for the economy and they are certainly not pretty for voters, which explains Dr Cullen’s particular anxiety to make sure that he is not labelled with any responsibility whatsoever for them. However, that appears to be not working, because it is now common gossip, coming not out of the National Party but out of the Labour Party, that Labour is wrestling with the trade-off of whether to get rid of him.

Should Labour keep Dr Cullen because he is the only competent Minister left on the front bench? I agree that he is. Compared with Steve Maharey, who we hear has got the job of vice-chancellor of Massey University—and if he has not got it, he is certainly trying very hard to get it—and the rest of them, Dr Cullen certainly is competent. So should Labour keep him because he is the one person the public believes can at least get to grips with an issue and has not completely lost it, or should it get rid of him because he represents political death for Labour every time he gets in the media? Every time Dr Cullen gets in the media, it reminds people that the Government thinks it can use their money better than they can, and that 7 years of Labour has led to the highest interest rates in the developed world. Not only are they the highest interest rates but they will stay the highest rates for longer; there is to be no relief before the end of 2008. I see today that a number of economists are picking that the situation will get worse, and I think the member for Waimakariri knows what that is doing to his majority out there in the suburbs.

We have the highest interest rates in the developed world and a Minister who believes he has had absolutely nothing to do with them. That is the credibility gap. Every time Dr Cullen claims that the Government’s decisions over the last 7 years have had absolutely nothing to do with the highest interest rates in the developed world, no one believes him.

Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Minister of Finance) : I just want to touch on one simple point for the benefit of the member: I have just done a little count here. I have been elected five times as the deputy leader of the Labour Party. I have been unopposed on every occasion. The member who has just been speaking briefly flew through the stratosphere as leader of the National Party, and was dumped humiliatingly—

Darren Hughes: By a pensioner!

Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN: That is right; by a pensioner—by a recycled Reserve Bank governor who somehow stumbled in here and never knew what he was doing when he got into the place. Then Mr English thought he would have another go, and we learnt all about that in North and South. After Mr English read about what he was supposed to do, he said that if he had really worked away at it, worked away at it for 2 or 3 weeks, he could have been leader again, but he decided that no, he would grind away in the background. Mr English decided that while John Key bounced from cloud to cloud, he would therefore effectively run the policy. Well, that is the National Party. Mr English goes to National’s caucus every day singing under his breath “Hey! You! Get off of my cloud.” to John Key. That is what he sings, because he is the man who should be on that cloud as far as he is concerned, and whenever there is a drop in the polls the knife will be out again.

But let us take fiscal policy. What is the massive conversion that has gone on in the National Party? I have stood here year after year being told that I was running obscenely large surpluses, that there was room for a massive fiscal loosening, and that if only I would loosen fiscal policy we could have everything we want in this country—absolutely everything, all the way through. That is what John Key is still saying, as he bounces from cloud to cloud. But down there, grinding away underneath, is Bill English. Bill English says to John Key that he is sorry, but if he wants to have tax cuts—and not big ones, just little ones, because Mr English has said there is no room for substantial tax cuts now—National will have to cut back the growth of spending. Mr English says National will have to cut back spending in the areas that matter.

Of course, what Mr English does not want to do is to tell us where those cuts would be. He hates me saying that, because it is true. When Mr English was last in the finance ministry he cut New Zealand superannuation, and that followed a decision to cut taxes. National could not afford to cut taxes, so it cut superannuation to pay for it. That is exactly what National did. It lowered the relativity of superannuation from 65 percent of the average wage for a married couple to 60 percent. It wanted to go to 55 percent—

Hon Bill English: That’s silly.

Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN: That is in the documentation; National wanted to go to 55 percent. So when Bill English said last week, musing away, grinding away, and suddenly popping out on a cloud somewhere by mistake, that retirement income provision in New Zealand is now too generous, he was not alarmed when bells went off. That happened when everybody suddenly said: “There they go again.” The National members have been in Opposition for 7½ years, getting on for 8 years, and still they have not learnt. But given a chance, they will hatchet into those core areas of State sector provision within New Zealand.

Hon Bill English: Don’t be silly.

Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN: It was silly. It was very, very silly, indeed, because it gave me a golden opportunity to say: “Aha, here’s where the cuts would come from.”

Hon Bill English: That’s silly.

Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN: Oh, it is not silly. I just remind members that National was in power for 9 years, and that for 3 of those years it cut New Zealand superannuation. It froze it for 2 years, which was a cut because there was no increase, and then in its last year in Government it cut the relativity. That was silly, but National did it, and the National members would do it again given half a chance.

But John Key says people should not worry, because as long as we borrow some more money, they can have everything they want. National would not even have to borrow, because Jacqui Dean has the answer: “We don’t need to borrow.”, she said at the last election, “We’ll get the money from overseas.” That is how National would pay for its promises. National is promising everybody anything. Has anybody here heard any National Party spokesperson call for a major cut in any major spending area? Every time there is a dispute in the health system, National says that the Government should give in and pay the doctors and nurses what they want. Every time there is a problem with regard to education, they say we need more money here, there, and everywhere. Mr English used to say it is terrible that parents have to contribute towards the cost of schools, and that the operations grant should be big enough for schools to not need to demand anything from parents. That is what he said. Well, that would be an increase in spending; it would actually be quite a big increase in spending.

Hon Bill English: So you will increase it?

Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN: Oh, not as much as the member wanted. I have news for the member: schools are still taking contributions from parents. And I will tell the member something else: it does not matter how much the schools get, because they would still take those contributions.

CHRIS TREMAIN (National—Napier) : I think we will get off Dr Cullen’s personal cloud there and come down to some of the details of the appropriations spending. What I want to focus on today for members of the public is some $41 million that is sought in advice from Treasury in three key areas—$13.32 million on economic performance policy advice, $17.59 million on State sector performance policy advice, and $11.439 million on macroeconomic policy advice, all of which are increased appropriations that the Minister of Finance has requested in this estimate. I want the public of New Zealand to understand the level of advice that has been appropriated in these estimates—whether that is good value for money, whether the Minister of Finance is using $41 million worth of advice as good value, or whether he is choosing to run his own path completely in other directions from where Treasury is recommending.

Just as an aside before I get into the detail of that, members of the public should know that this estimate equates to a total of $5.643 billion in spending. Of that, $2.1 billion is in borrowing expenses, $2.4 billion is in capital expenditure, and there is another odd billion there for other expenses. But there is $56.53 million in departmental output expenses. Of that amount, $41 million is in three key areas of advice.

One would hope that the $41 million investment in those three key areas of advice would be focused on taking the country forward. Those three key areas, which should have the aim of really driving the country forward, are, firstly, improving New Zealand’s economic performance, $13.32 million; secondly, improving the performance of our State sector, $17.59 million; and, thirdly, improving macroeconomic policy, at $11.439 million.

Let us start with improving New Zealand’s economic performance. We will all remember the much-vaunted call by Dr Cullen in his 2001 Budget speech to lift New Zealand’s economic efforts, comparative to other OECD countries, to the top half of the OECD. What have we achieved, despite a significant level of advice over the years? In fact, we have dropped down the ladder in terms of economic performance. Unfortunately, the positive moves in the Budget, especially on company tax, are overshadowed by the absence of a strategic direction and of effective policies to lift our economy’s sagging growth rate.

If we go back to 2001, the sustainable projected growth rate was estimated by the Minister of Finance to be 4 percent. As we look forward in this set of estimates and the Budget for this year, we have been averaging a GDP growth rate of 2.5 percent. This is below the growth rates of our key financial partners like Australia, and certainly below the growth rates of the early 2000s and the late 1990s. Unfortunately, on present policy settings, the income gaps between ourselves and Australia will continue to increase. So I say to members of the public that we have to ask ourselves whether the $13.32 million that has been appropriated here is good expenditure and whether we have had good advice that has been well heeded.

The improvement of State sector performance is a very relevant point. The Minister has requested $17.59 million in policy advice from Treasury. It is not just a small amount; it is $17.59 million. We ask ourselves whether we are getting good value for money in that. Achieving improvement in State sector performance is about getting more outputs from the inputs into the State sector. What we see there is excessive and wasteful Government spending, up by a massive $3.8 billion over the next financial year. We also see that cost increases from regulation will continue to go up, stifling productivity growth, conflicting with monetary policy, and certainly damaging the export sector.

Hon Dr Michael Cullen: How much money have you made out of this Government, Chris?

CHRIS TREMAIN: I tell my friend Dr Cullen that I am not in the export sector, so I do not have the issues of the exchange rate, but many members of the Napier community who are in the export sector are struggling because of where the dollar is right now. There are serious worries about the value for money we are getting, in terms of the advice in this particular section, for $17.59 million.

SHANE JONES (Labour) : Aotearoa, please wake up! What we heard from Chris Tremain was a speech that started with some promise but got lost in labyrinths of figures that were beyond the capacity of that speaker, who is really more interested in apples, sunshine, and the likelihood of an earthquake striking Hawke’s Bay.

Of course, the earthquake—emotional—is actually striking National. While Labour members were out toiling in the field, working amongst our electors, the earthbound—or sheep-dipped—Mr English of Dipton was reminding the people of New Zealand both that he was parsimonious. He would not allow the confidence and reassurance that old people and people of the middle-aged sector are beginning to feel, as a consequence of our Budget, to take root. Mr English chooses to make fun of his own leader in the media at every opportunity when he speaks publicly. He harbours ongoing, unrequited desires to actually be the leader one day. Fortunately for the country, that day will never come to pass as there is a new group of people. Although that was a lacklustre speech from the member from Hawke’s Bay, Chris Tremain, the man may very well emulate the feats of his father and rise to great heights in the National Party.

Anyhow, let us talk about what we are actually delivering in this Budget. KiwiSaver does two things. First, it is an overdue contribution to strengthening the capital markets of New Zealand at a time when we suffer the depredations of our friends in Australia. Mr English and Mr Key take every available opportunity to scare people away, telling them Australia is so much better, and showing an absence of patriotism, whilst at the same time promising to have a remedy better than that of our side of the House. But what really puzzles us is why Mr English has chosen, at a time when National has absolutely no policy—it fears to crystallise any of its thinking as to what its policies will be—to remind everyone National is not to be trusted in the area of superannuation.

Thank goodness for Dr Cullen’s stewardship of our Budget. We have continued to maintain surpluses. In addition, we have a net positive situation in relation to debt. Of course, that will disappear if Mr Key has the opportunity to turn into reality his unfolding and drivelling rhetoric. Any time two dogs, five women, and three cats are to be found together, they are forced to listen to Mr Key talking about how the economy is under-leveraged. This man wanders around talking to rat catchers and various other characters from local government—who ought to stop meeting with him and attacking the Government, and go home and deal with the floods in Northland—and he continues to tell them they need to go out and raise debt. So the situation we have created, which is now a model of great pride and some envy throughout the world, with moderate levels of debt, would be overturned if Mr Key had his way.

But, of course, at the same time, he is reminded by Dr Smith—Dr Lockwood Smith; anything he is reminded of by Nick Smith he should immediately forget and put into the dust heap of history—that additional expenditure will not help the situation, because we have productivity constraints. There is not a single thing to be heard from either of those two men as to how productivity constraints might be dealt with, which is what we do in this Budget with our ongoing investment in making business more efficient, reducing the tax burden, and improving the opportunities for research and capital development. That is what productivity problems require in terms of a remedy.

So local government, regional government, and central government will all suffer high levels of debt if Mr Key has his way. Fortunately the sheep-dipped, earthbound Mr English will probably prevent that from happening. I must confess that when I hear Mr English speak about economics I am reminded of my padre’s story about the Munchkins from Kansas. His type of economics is small, it is insular, and it defies reality, because at one level he will not moderate the spending ambitions of his colleagues, whilst Mr Key wanders around promoting—[Interruption] Yes, that is a brilliant analogy. I salute the clever Dr Cullen for reminding the country—

Hon Dr Michael Cullen: It was Bill English—

SHANE JONES: No, Mr English makes these obscure, half-baked comments, thinking we will not pick up on them. Dr Cullen has reminded the country that whilst Mr English is earthbound, Mr Key is in outer space. I could say he has gone intergalactic and he is beyond Uranus. Kia ora tātou.

CRAIG FOSS (National—Tukituki) : Following the previous speaker, who is earning his new nickname—I believe it is “Parekura Lite”—as he seeks to fulfil his ambitions, I will speak to Vote Finance, but maybe this speech is more about a vote of no confidence in the Minister of Finance.

Towards the end of his speech earlier, the Minister of Finance had a go at someone for wanting to borrow money overseas to fund tax cuts. Actually, Dr Cullen also borrows overseas, because many of the holders of his bonds, treasury bills, etc., are owned overseas. So, in fact, Michael Cullen borrows from overseas in order to fund the various votes. Does he borrow to fund tax cuts and various distributions? Yes, he does. In recently answering a written question in which I asked him whether the funding from the various borrowing and bond programmes was allocated to specific budgets or specific votes, he said that, no, it was not, and that it essentially just went into the queue at Treasury. So we do not know what happens to the money that Dr Cullen borrows from overseas, but, quite frankly, it could be used to fund tax cuts.

Dr Cullen’s obituary is being written as we speak. We have heard it earlier. He endlessly puts out spin. We have just recently seen some taxpayer-funded advertisements about the various policy packages of 1 July that Labour brought out in the recent Budget. Let us look at what will be on Dr Cullen’s tombstone.

In 1999, when Dr Cullen became Minister of Finance, the official cash rate was around 4.5 or 4.75 percent. In 2007, Export Year, that rate is 8 percent and is going higher, according to the analysis of only today—almost double the 1999 rate. When Dr Cullen became Minister of Finance, the current account deficit was about 3 percent, and he predicted it would go down to 2 percent. In fact, today it is about 8.5 percent. As Dr Cullen alluded to in question time today, when he became Minister of Finance the Kiwi dollar was valued at around US40c. I think he said it went down to US38c. In this year, Export Year, the Kiwi dollar is at nearly US80c, and, again, it is predicted to go higher than that. What a disgraceful legacy that is, after 7 years of a commodity boom.

When Dr Cullen became Minister of Finance in 1999, the highest tax rate was 33 percent. It is now 39 percent. At that time he also said that only 5 percent of taxpayers would be in that bracket. Currently, around 12 to 14 percent of taxpayers are in that bracket.

Home affordability, when Dr Cullen became Minister of Finance in 1999, was at around 4½ times average earnings. Today it is 7½ times average earnings. New Zealanders are unable to even aspire to own their first homes now, let alone to fund any type of mortgage.

When Dr Cullen became Minister of Finance, the proportion of the average wage paid in tax was about 19 percent. In the year 2007 that figure is now 23 percent—23 percent of the average wage is now paid in tax. I say to Dr Cullen that that is a disgrace, after 7 years of the incredible commodity boom that the New Zealand Government has enjoyed but that the New Zealand public most certainly has not.

Every one of those statistics has a terrible impact on our families and on their aspirations, and all that those statistics seem to do is to make more New Zealanders go overseas. The previous speaker started to make fun of Australia. Well, in fact, 500,000 New Zealanders have chosen to move to Australia. Basically, those people have chosen to go to a wealthier country than this one, and they are in a better position than we are to handle a high currency exchange rate and high interest rates. They have shared in and enjoyed the commodity boom over the last 5 or 6 years, because there has been a programme of personal tax cuts, year after year, in Australia. One cannot hide from that fact. Many Kiwis are envious of the New Zealanders who are now in Australia and enjoying the current tax rates and the economic boom there.

Dr Cullen also suggested a mortgage levy in 2006. Well, the mortgage levy is here. New Zealanders will be paying about $3 billion more in interest in 2008 than they were in 2006—$3 billion more for New Zealand mortgage payers; that is what they will be paying. That is the mortgage levy. It has arrived loud and clear, and Dr Cullen’s name is all over it.

The exchange rate of the New Zealand dollar is probably as high as it has been in 22 years. Our interest rates are the highest in the Western World and, more important, in the trading world. Some people seem to forget, even in this Export Year, that we are a trading nation. Again, I say New Zealanders have not been able to share in the commodity boom. Yes, we have dairying, yes, we have forestry, and yes, we have coal. Dr Cullen’s legacy is a disgrace.

Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE (Associate Minister of Finance) : That gentleman from the National Party, Craig Foss, is known for two things in this House. One is the fact that he spent all his time overseas when the National Party went into office, and he returned to New Zealand only when a Labour Government came in. Secondly, he waxes eloquent about tax, but he is known for one thing on tax in this House: bringing up his own tax return before the Finance and Expenditure Committee and asking the Inland Revenue Department for advice on it. That is his limitation on tax. He asked about the Labour record in office. I remind him that while he was overseas when the National Government was in office—and he returned in around 1999, when we won—unemployment was at 6.5 percent. When he came back from overseas after National lost, unemployment was at 6.5 percent, which the Labour Government inherited.

I remind him of the noose that hangs around Labour’s and Dr Cullen’s neck, which is one of 3.4 percent unemployment. Two young people in Kaiapoi, in my electorate, are unemployed and on the Work and Income books. No one is unemployed in Papanui and Rangiora. That is the legacy and the noose that hangs about every Labour member’s neck. My word, if it is a noose I want more of it, I want it to be heavier, and I want more of it now. Unemployment has never been so low since that member came back from overseas under a Labour Government.

I will challenge the National Party. We have found out three policies. I could not believe my luck when Dr Cullen allowed me to act for him for a couple of days while he was overseas. We netted, we snared, and we punctured the big fish, Mr English. What Mr English told the country—and I want every Grey Power member and every senior citizens club to listen to this—was that he raised the spectre of the means test on superannuation and the asset test on superannuation, and said superannuation was too generous. Then he said—and this must be a sort of “blue youth” strategy—that one could not win the 20-plus vote by telling those people that they would be secure in their retirement and that superannuation was too generous. Well, I want every person to listen to that, because of the history of that man and his successor, Don Brash, who, I ask members to remember, raised the spectre of raising the age from 65 to 70.

On 3 November, of course, John Key said the same thing: “We recognise that 65 is 65,”. He then went on to say: “and we are honouring that, but I don’t think there’s any doubt that the single-biggest way to reduce that liability is to raise the age of eligibility.” I tell members to believe what Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber say. They did it in Government. Bill English cut the pension twice. He was in a Government that raised it to 65. Don Brash said he might do it, National says it wants to abolish the Cullen fund, and Brian Fallow blew that one open on 3 November, when he said: “National also wants to abolish the Cullen superannuation fund.” Brash said he would raise the age, then we had Bill English; he could not be reined in by John Key, and he raised the spectre again. I tell every elderly person in the country not to judge them by their words; they should judge them by their actions in Government.

Then we have the other policy, Working for Families. National wants to tinker with Working for Families and give a tax cut. It wants to give an across-the-board tax cut where Mr English gets $110 a week, and 160,000 families lose about $50 to $80 a week. If someone is on $52,000 with three kids, and that person has a mortgage and is eligible, that person will pull in possibly $246 per week. That is 350,000 families, on average, getting $110 a week. So what Mr English says to the country is: “Give everybody a tax cut.”, and everybody says: “Hey, this is a great thing.”, until the communities do the figures and realise that 80 or 95 percent of them are out of the back door. So that is Working for Families.

Then, of course, we have Muldoon Mark II. Mr English and Mr Key say they think they will tinker with KiwiSaver. Well, we had a poll and did some research, and a third of young people say they will sign up, because they want to use the money for the first home that Mr Foss waxes on about when he talks about housing unaffordability. They want older folk to have security in their retirement. Those people who have never had the chance to get into superannuation want to have a go. And what does Bill “Rob Muldoon” English want to do? He and Mr Key have done 1975 all over again. They have raised the spectre that says when Kiwis get their statement next year, that shows how much money the Government, the employer, and they have put aside for their retirement—but hang on; as we approach an election, they should not tear that statement up, because Bill English says he will pull the rug out, so if National wins, and it will not, we will see the second-biggest piece of economic and social vandalism visited on this country. The first was Muldoon, when he bribed people with their own money and pulled the rug out from under every superannuitant in the country. The second one is that he has raised the spectre of it again.

So we have clarity at last around the Opposition, we have clarity around Working for Families, and 160,000 people should now reflect that they are going to have the economic rug pulled out from under them because Bill English wants every member of this House—all of us top 5 percent income earners—to get 110 bucks a week. All those 160,000 families gaining their own money back in tax credits—on average $110 a week—will get squat. They might get 10 or 20 bucks.

I ask communities to reflect on that. I ask elderly folk and those in their 50s, those who are 50 today, to reflect on the words of Bill English that I predict will come back to haunt him if I have anything to do about it, and will be drilled into him every time he tries to make a speech on superannuation. He wants to cut it—he said that. His leader has paraded around the country and said his party will tell anything to anybody, it will promise anything, it will ditch any policy and any moral fibre or ideology that it does have if it is deemed to be unpopular.

But I must hand it to Mr English that maybe he has been honest—and I think he has been; he has been absolutely upfront and honest because he is a true Tory, blue through and through. He will cut superannuation and he will nail every person on the cusp of retirement and every young person who wants to start to buy a new home. What good is a tax cut of 10 or 20 bucks a week to a mechanic, or a young person on a low income who is saving to get a home, when they can enrol in KiwiSaver and use the Government’s money, their employer’s money, and their own money to convert that into a deposit for a first home? I ask him to explain that and to go down to the mechanic’s shop and the chippy’s shop and all those young people who—at least one-third of them—are now looking at getting into the scheme. Then, of course, KiwiSaver—in the spectre he has raised—gets the rug pulled from under it.

So I ask Mr Foss, that great tax return expert, to reflect on records. I ask him to remember when he came back from his lofty job and graced us, the people of New Zealand, with his presence on our shores—he came back when Labour was in Government—and to reflect on the situation then: 6.5 percent unemployment, no apprenticeship system, because National got rid of it, students with debt up to their eyeballs, a mortgage, but no house, effectively; and I ask him to reflect on the situation now: 3.4 percent unemployment, interest-free loans and incentives to stay here, a re-engaging in apprenticeships of 10,000, and next year there will be 14,000 young people in trade training. I ask him, whilst he was overseas earning his big bucks, to reflect on that record because that record stands in stark contrast to three cuts in the pension, the rug pulled out from the elderly, apprenticeships going, and all the other insidious economic vandalism that National engaged in.

Finally, I invite all the communities to reflect very, very carefully and not to be bought and sold by slogans. Tax cuts may sound great until the communities—and they are smart—do the numbers and work out the figures. I remember Gerry Brownlee—the man who has as much credibility as a Mississippi riverboat gambler—saying on the radio that people do not understand budgets, they would not know a budget, they do not understand them. I say that if people can balance their housekeeping, if they can go out and get the groceries and sort out their bills, they have a PhD in economics in the community. They are not silly, they will read Mr English’s words, which will be the epitaph on his political tombstone, and they will be revisited time and time again on him. I invite him, if he wants to, to get up and deny anything I have said and to refute anything I have said on Working for Families, on national superannuation, and on KiwiSaver. Do you know what? He will not do that, he cannot, because at least he is honest about it.

TIM GROSER (National) : I found it very interesting that Clayton Cosgrove, in his presentation, started to talk about Michael Cullen’s legacy. It is amazing what people under pressure reveal about their true thinking. What does the word “legacy” mean? When we start talking about people’s legacy, we are talking about people who are on their way out—possibly literally as well as metaphorically.

I want to take up the challenge that Mr Cosgrove put down and give my view of the Cullen legacy, and I will refer to an earlier career that Michael Cullen had as an economic historian. As an economic historian, Michael Cullen may well remember the methodology called thought experiments, so I will put a thought experiment on the floor of the Chamber. I ask what Michael Cullen the economic historian would have made of Michael Cullen the Minister of Finance, because that would be a very interesting subject for debate. I am probably not confident that such a separation is possible, so I will give members what I think economic historians will make of Michael Cullen’s legacy as Minister of Finance.

I think the main theme of Michael Cullen’s legacy—if I can use Clayton Cosgrove’s phrase—will be a story, fundamentally, about missed opportunities. There was a time, when this Government inherited political power, when we thought it might just build on the successes of the past. It had inherited an economy in which the unemployment rate had fallen progressively through the 1990s from about 11.5 percent to a little over 6 percent, with a much more dramatic fall in Māori unemployment. It had seen double-digit inflation squeezed out of the economy, and it had Government accounts that, through a process of fiscal consolidation, were in much better shape than previously. New Zealand was extremely well placed to build on that success, and there was a moment in time when I and many other people with both a strong personal and professional interest thought that maybe this Government might just do it.

But unfortunately, that thought collapsed very quickly. It collapsed, I thought, finally during an argument between Dr John Hood and the Prime Minister. When faced with the idea of a target of getting New Zealand back into the top half of the OECD, the Prime Minister backed off very, very fast when she understood what the real political implications of following a wealth-creating, growth-oriented programme would mean for this Labour Government. Instead, Labour fell back to type, and decided to sit in the sun and play the politics of redistribution.

I would say we are seeing, after 7 years of that, the chickens come home to roost. We have seen cost increases spread, imperceptibly at times but cumulatively, throughout the economy, a continual growth of low-quality Government expenditures in such areas as health, a big-ticket item where there has been a $4 billion increase in funding and a 23 percent increase in the number of health administrators—adding what, in terms of productivity and in terms of health outcomes? We have seen a continual increase in interest rates, which are now considerably above other countries’ interest rates, and we have seen a continuation of the New Zealand exodus as, faced with a global job market, New Zealanders are simply voting with their feet. I think those are some of the key elements in the legacy of Michael Cullen, the Minister of Finance. It would be intriguing to know what an earlier and younger Michael Cullen, as an economic historian, might have made of what Mr Cosgrove calls Dr Cullen’s legacy.

Most of all, we have seen a slow-down in New Zealand’s productivity growth rate, which in the long run is perhaps the most troublesome of all of the legacies of the reign of this Minister of Finance over—now—almost 2½ terms. We have seen total factor productivity growth halved—no, it is down by more than a half; I think it has fallen to nearly one-third of its previous rate—and labour productivity growth halved, if we compare the productivity growth rates from 1992 to 2000 with those of the last 6 years.

In contrast, the National Party offers New Zealand a focus on growth and a focus on tax reform, not just as a one-off hit when forced by politics to go into that issue but also as a continual focus in order to maintain the competitiveness of the tax structures in this country.

• Vote agreed to.

Hon DAVID CARTER (National) : It is with pleasure that I take a call on Vote Agriculture and Forestry in the 2007-08 estimates debate. I guess the examination that the Primary Production Committee did left National members of Parliament in no doubt that the Minister of Agriculture simply does not understand the issues. We examined him over a period of an hour or more. We asked him serious questions, and we got the waffly sorts of answers that the farming community now expects from this Minister. There is no substance, but a whole lot of waffle and fluff, without any actual support for the farmers of this country. Mr Anderton seemed to be absolutely oblivious to the pressure that many farmers are under. He was proud of the fact that while the East Coast of the North Island was under severe drought pressure, he managed to take a helicopter ride over the province—a whirlwind tour. It had rained a couple of days after his visit, and he claimed credit for being the “Minister in Charge of Weather-changing Ability”.

What really surprised the select committee, though, was the very dramatic increase in staff that has occurred in the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. In 2003 it employed just over 1,200 people. In the last 4 years, there has been a 40 percent increase, to 1,650 full-time employees. That is a massive 40 percent increase. The select committee delved into those figures and found some very surprising trends. Firstly, 980 of them are Biosecurity New Zealand staff—and my colleague Shane Ardern will certainly comment very shortly on their ability to do their job—and, secondly, 475 of them are in the Food Safety Authority, which leaves only 185 to do the real work that is required by Vote Agriculture and Forestry, which is to analyse the issues that present themselves to the farming community.

During the examination of Mr Anderton, he proudly said there were 13 substantial discussion documents out there being analysed by those 185 policy analysts. He did not seem to appreciate how important those particular policy documents are. The sustainable land management discussion document has been out there now for months. It was reported back after a series of public meetings, which were not attended by any Government MPs—they would not front up. But, certainly, every one had a raft of National MPs there to listen to the woes of the sector, particularly to those of the forestry sector around climate change. But the one that I picked up on was the programme that Mr Anderton calls the Sustainable Water Programme of Action. What quickly became evident to us is that it is the programme of inaction. There have been absolutely no decisions from that Minister in relation to one of the most pressing concerns facing rural New Zealanders, which is how to maximise the use of potential water sources in order to maximise production. We are just not getting the answers from this Minister at all on that issue.

The members of the select committee then found, when we looked at the new initiatives the Minister was very proud of, that the main one was a congress. Yes, in November this year Mr Anderton is organising a congress, and he has a million dollars of taxpayers’ money to fund it. So we asked him where the stupid idea of having another talkfest came from, and he tried to tell the select committee that he had called a dinner at Vogel House for all primary sector leaders, and that they had asked for the congress. Now, we, frankly, do not believe the Minister, because we know the leaders of the primary industries far better than Mr Anderton does, and we know the last thing they want is more talk. They actually want some action. What we were able to find out, during the select committee examination, is that for a million dollars Mr Anderton will hold a talkfest in late November this year. Speakers from all over the world will be brought in. We asked who they were, and the Minister said that that information was commercially secretive at this stage, but we do know they are coming from all over the world to speak to farmers. Then we found out that there will be a charge for people to attend the congress—Mr Horomia nods his head—of $500 to $800.

Farmers are under real pressure because lamb is now worth 30 to 40 percent less than it was worth a year ago, and Mr Anderton’s solution is to hold a talkfest and ask farmers to pay 800 bucks in order to attend it. It is all about photo opportunities for Mr Anderton, and the sooner that people realise that is all that Minister is good for, the better it will be.

R DOUG WOOLERTON (NZ First) : Unlike the National Party member David Carter, I do not rise to criticise the Minister of Agriculture, who is also the Minister of Forestry.

Hon David Carter: He’s on your side.

R DOUG WOOLERTON: Oh no. New Zealand First members can criticise whom we like, and the member can attempt to say otherwise if he likes. This industry is far too important for us to play politics with in that manner.

Firstly, I want to say that the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry is basically a ministry for policy advice. That is where the bulk of its budget is spent, and, I think, rightly so.

It worries me—and I certainly would agree with the Opposition as far as this goes—that the dollar is at 79c against the US dollar. That is the most serious thing facing our farmers and exporters at this point. New Zealand First attempted this afternoon to introduce a bill that, although no silver bullet, would go some way, we think, to ameliorating those problems, and we may try again in the future. The high dollar is a real problem and we want to see more than lip service being paid to getting it down.

But these industries—agriculture and forestry—are right at the forefront of our exports. In particular, New Zealand’s biggest company, Fonterra, which has turnover in excess of $13 billion, makes up 20 percent of New Zealand’s exports. The dairy industry, which is just one part of the agriculture sector, is huge. I must say that when we look at other countries and at the things they do, we see that they are in quite stark contrast to what we do. We spend the money on science. We spend the money on market penetration. We spend the money on advertising. And, most of all, the money goes back to the farmers for reinvestment on the farm to further those advances.

I think it is here—if I can move slightly off Fonterra—that I can congratulate the Minister, Mr Anderton, because he has called for some encouragement to use wood in Government buildings in this country. For a long time now, New Zealand First has said we should use what we grow in this country, we should use what we have to hand, rather than spending money on exports. So we support the Minister in that initiative.

New Zealand First said at the last election—and was laughed at, I might say, particularly by the Greens—that we must plant more trees in this country. We said that the planting of trees is the greatest thing we can do to offset our carbon emissions in the form of methane, which comes from our very important livestock sector. That is still a concern for us, and although I will not go on and criticise anybody for the current situation, we believe that any incentives should be through the taxation system. We have said that all along, and we believe that people who plant trees should be given a financial incentive for doing that. They should have a financial reward for doing that, because it will not happen otherwise. People in the farming sector, in the agriculture sector, do do things for the country, and I do not know one farmer, including Mr Ardern over there in the National Party, who does not believe that farmers are doing God’s work; they are producing food and they are producing products that we export. But, at the same time, they cannot do that if they are not rewarded fully for it. We know that returns in the forestry sector, even though they are coming up, are still not sufficient for people off their own bat to go and plant more trees. New Zealand wants trees, and New Zealand First says people should have a financial incentive to ensure they plant more.

I think that when it comes to climate change, which is also a concern in the agriculture and forestry sectors, we should look at science to lead the way.

SHANE ARDERN (National—Taranaki-King Country) : It is with pleasure that I rise to speak in this estimates debate on the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. I will share with the Committee some of the concerns I have as a result of being part of the Primary Production Committee that examined those estimates.

First of all, I asked the Minister for Biosecurity, Jim Anderton, what was being done to control didymo and how much work was going into research into a way to control it and, potentially, eradicate it. The Minister said to me that I had spread much misinformation on that subject. In fact, I think the Minister dedicated about four pages of the 8-page communiqué that came out afterwards to criticising my comments, which demonstrates that I clearly got under the Minister’s skin at that select committee and hit a raw nerve.

But, that having been said, he asked what I was doing with regard to promoting the good works of Biosecurity New Zealand, and he said that, instead of being negative, I should promote the positive things that have happened with regard to the control of didymo. I thought I would do a bit of research and see how the rest of the community is seeing this good work.

In a summer survey of users of upper South Island rivers, 24 percent reported that they had checked, cleaned, and dried their gear with regard to shifting from one river to another. What do we know about the spread of didymo? We know that it is being spread by people, not by wildlife as first thought by this Minister. That would clearly demonstrate that this is not working, and the Minister needs to do more about it.

What has the Minister done in response to the Tongariro recreational group that made several submissions to him about trying to contain didymo in the South Island? The answer is that he has done very little, if anything at all. They are gravely concerned. Let us look at some facts. In the past 5 years 233 new organisms have entered New Zealand. New Zealand’s isolation has given us a special environment to enjoy and protect, and we need to do so. The question is: how much insurance is too much and how much is not enough? Clearly, when we look at those statistics, we can see that we do not have enough insurance at the moment. The most dangerous enemy we face in biosecurity in New Zealand at the moment is the culture of apathy that exists within the Minister and his department. The Minister needs to take account of what is happening at our borders and do something. We are too slow to react. We are too quick to dismiss eradication as an option.

I do not accept that it is too hard, like the Minister does, and I do not accept that there is not enough scientific evidence around the world to address some of these issues. The Minister need only look across the Tasman to our Australian counterparts and ask what happened in the case of the black-striped mussel incursion in Darwin Harbour to find out that they used a copper sulphate - based material, similar to that now being promoted by the Environmental Risk Management Authority as a potential control for didymo. Yet the Minister and the ministry will tell us that there was no science-based evidence that suggested at the time that that may be a successful product. Why not talk to international biosecurity agencies that have done the work?

Last year 15 tonnes of fruit fly material was intercepted at our borders, including 8.2 tonnes of meat products and 3.7 tonnes of grain. How do we know this? We know this because we caught those people—it was on their person. We could say that that is good, but Biosecurity New Zealand itself says its audit suggests that, at best, 10 percent gets through, and any one of these products has the potential to devastate our economy. I say to the Committee today that it is time this Minister did more than just have a talkfest. He should get off his butt and do something about it. Clearly our $200 instant fine at the borders is not working.

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): This is agriculture and forestry.

SHANE ARDERN: Biosecurity is definitely part of that. I think you should go back and have a look at what is being debated here.

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): It is a separate vote.

SHANE ARDERN: I have to inform the Chairman that biosecurity is still part of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. We may have to have this dispute off-line later, but that is a fact.

In 2005 we issued 7,627 instant fines. Of those, 5,000 were issued to visitors to this country. We have to ask whether those laws are being upheld. I say that they are not. More needs to be done to protect our borders.

Hon DAMIEN O'CONNOR (Minister for Rural Affairs) : I stand as Minister for Rural Affairs and as Acting Minister of Agriculture to respond to some of the ridiculous claims made here in the Chamber. I have to say that it was rather rich of the previous speaker to get up in this Chamber and criticise Biosecurity New Zealand. When we came into Government in 1999 the National Government had spent $86 million or thereabouts on biosecurity. This year $186 million has been spent. That is why we are catching more people who are trying to bring in goods. That is why we are catching more at the borders. I say that that is a measure of success.

The speeches we have just heard clearly identify a party wracked with division. It really does not know whether it should advocate for more spending and more people in agriculture and forestry—an area in which over 17 percent of the GDP in this country is created and generated. It is a party that does not know whether it should criticise the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry for increasing the number of staff by 40 percent, or whether it should cut its spending and see that number of staff reduced to the point where they are not able to undertake the tasks before them.

I will go through just a few things. I think the select committee report correctly identifies a few of the issues facing the ministry. It is a key policy department, it has huge responsibilities in the areas of biosecurity and food safety, and I think it has done an exceptional job through the year.

I would like to look at what we might consider as the alternative policy. What would those critics, who we have just heard in this Chamber, put up by way of an alternative to the current management—

Chris Auchinvole: Nothing.

Hon DAMIEN O'CONNOR: Not nothing, if I can challenge that assertion. In fact, Mr Key announced a keynote address—“note” being the important part of that, I would have to suggest, because it certainly was not a substantive document—at the Fieldays, and the National Party released its rural policy document. Here it is, in my hand: the alternative to the current management of agriculture and forestry in this country. We have to remember that this was launched by Mr John Key, a person who in 2005 said with regard to Kyoto, given that we now accept, I think, that climate change, food miles, and a number of other issues are challenges before us and Kyoto is an international agreement that we are all looking to for guidance: “this is a complete and utter hoax, if I may say so. The impact of the Kyoto Protocol, even if one believes in global warming—and I am somewhat suspicious of it—is that we will see billions and billions of dollars poured into fixing something that we are not even sure is a problem”.

I think the world accepts that we do have a challenge ahead of us—certainly the people of Northland do—and we are prepared to move forward. That is why, when we came into Government, we set up the Sustainable Farming Fund. That is why we have poured more money into research and development. It is absolutely essential, in an area that produces 17 percent of our GDP, that we should have a sustainable production system in place.

So what we will have now is an alternative policy, or so we are told. I flicked through the rural policy document. There is a lovely photo of Mr John Key and one of Mr David Carter in it. It moves on through into key areas. On sustainable agriculture there are no proposals—absolutely no policy proposals at all. On forestry there are no proposals, but it states: “National believes Labour’s 10 percent deforestation cap should be abolished, because it has become counterproductive to both the economy and the environment.” So I would ask Mr Carter how National would put some limits on deforestation in this country.

In research and development there is another one-pager from the National Party. There are absolutely no policy proposals from the National Party.

It moves on to another area that the National Party has made a song and dance about for years: the Resource Management Act. National brought that Act into legislation, and the only thing that I can see here is a proposal to introduce new mechanisms to eliminate vexatious and frivolous objections. Well, if National had done its homework, it would have found out that in 2005, just prior to the last election, that is exactly what we did, and we changed the legislation.

We move on to rural infrastructure. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, stated by way of policy, other than a statement regarding rural telecommunications. It states: “National will be looking closely at this issue.” Well, I wish Mr Carter good luck. There are one-pagers on property rights and land access, and nothing by way of policy proposals. However, moving on to the next one, Landcorp, it states: “National favours a carefully staged process of selling Landcorp farms”. I guess that National members will have to fund their tax cuts in some way. I do not think that Landcorp, the agricultural sector in this country, or, indeed, Mr Ardern think that selling Landcorp is a smart idea, because I know that the member understands full well the value of being a participant in what is a key part of our economy.

There is another page on accident compensation. I think it is important that, in spite of the absence of anything coming from the previous speakers, we identify some indications of where National, should it ever come into Government, could possibly take us in some key areas. National will reintroduce competition to the accident compensation market. Those members will privatise accident compensation. Let us get it out on the table and put it out where people can understand it. In an area of the economy such as in agriculture, where farmers are—[Interruption] Yes, Mr Chairman, I will keep it tight; it is, I know, a waste of time trying to refer to National Party policy.

This Government full well understands the need to support agriculture and forestry through the proper investment in infrastructure and in research and development. They are things that cost this Government money. We consider it to be investment. The National Party’s only proposals—to sell Landcorp, to privatise accident compensation, and to cut taxes—mean only one thing. That means key cut-backs in areas of rural health, rural education, and in roading. In this document we have a question from the National Party about how they think rural roads should be funded. Mr Williamson put a proposal out there to have private funding for roads, and perhaps my colleague Mr Duynhoven could explain that, because I am sure the National Party—

Hon David Carter: Good proposal.

Hon DAMIEN O'CONNOR: Mr Carter says that is a good proposal. It is really important that when National releases its agricultural policy, those members say exactly what they mean—

Hon David Carter: Oh, we will.

Hon DAMIEN O'CONNOR: Well, that is great, because that member has not said it with regard to any other policy area.

Hon David Carter: You’ve just been announcing it.

Hon DAMIEN O'CONNOR: If I have been announcing National Party policy, I am sure that the country would be pleased to hear that.

The Minister of Agriculture is indeed focused on, and dedicated to, agriculture. The summit that has been referred to rather flippantly is the first time in 30 years that all parts of the agricultural sector will be brought together to discuss and to focus on the huge challenges that face us, as we move into the market, about value-added agriculture, about proper infrastructural investment, and about proper biosecurity. This Government is very proud to stand on its record of investment in biosecurity, in rural roading, and in rural health care, and of supportive legislation that has seen the agricultural sector grow and prosper under this Government.

• Vote agreed to.

PHIL HEATLEY (National—Whangarei) : Thank you, Mr Chairperson—[Interruption] It is interesting that the Minister Pete Hodgson, who passed the hospital pass to other fisheries Ministers after him in the aquaculture arena, is the first member to heckle, mock, and make light of this fisheries report in the Committee today. I would remind the former Minister of Fisheries Pete Hodgson of what happened with the aquaculture reforms. Under this Labour Government there have been a fair few former Ministers of Fisheries, and I will count them. We had Minister Pete Hodgson, who complicated the proposed aquaculture reforms; then we had Minister David Benson-Pope, who further complicated the actual aquaculture reforms; and now we have Jim Anderton, who is running around the country apologising for the aquaculture reforms. But it was Pete Hodgson who started it all, so I am intrigued that he is the first one to try to disrupt me in this Chamber.

I would make a mention to this Committee of the intriguing section of this fisheries report on aquaculture. Although I raise it with the Committee, members may recall 2½ years ago when the Labour Government passed the aquaculture reforms through this Parliament. In those reforms the Government stated that it would create aquaculture management areas up and down the coastline of this country. It would create large-scale areas off the coastline where aquaculture could occur. In the 2½ years since that time, the Labour Government has created zero aquaculture management areas up and down the coastline of this country. There have been zero new aquaculture management areas created in 2½ years.

Are there any aquaculture management areas? Yes. What the Minister has done is to draw a pencil around all the existing marine farms in the country and call them aquaculture management areas, but in terms of new areas, where new aquaculture can move in, not a single square metre has been created in New Zealand in the last 2½ years. That is fascinating in the sense that recently the Minister paid $65,000 of taxpayer money to brag to the country that he would back growing of the aquaculture industry into a billion-dollar industry in 2025. He used $65,000 of taxpayers’ money to promote growing the aquaculture industry into a billion-dollar industry in 2025 after he announced his wonderful reforms. What he did not know was that the industry had decided before his reforms that it would be a billion-dollar industry in 2020. Before the reforms, a billion-dollar industry in 2020; after the reforms, a billion-dollar industry in 2025! The taxpayer paid $65,000 to inform the public that we have slipped back 5 years after the Minister’s reforms. That is very sad news for aquaculture, indeed.

What is doubly worrying is that, tied to the aquaculture law reform that happened 2½ years ago, Māori were promised 20 percent of existing aquaculture space. What is more, they were promised 20 percent of all new aquaculture space. There has been no new aquaculture space; therefore, there has been no granting of space to Māori, whatsoever. In other words, 2½ years ago Parekura Horomia ran up and down marae all over this country, talking about the wonderful aquaculture settlement, but Parekura Horomia has not delivered a single square metre to any iwi anywhere in the country. He has gone along to marae, he has accepted a feed, he has eaten pipi and had a good boil-up, but he has not delivered a single square metre of aquaculture space to any iwi in the country.

According to Ministry of Fisheries figures, of course, Parekura Horomia has actually promised iwi right throughout the country—and this is on the ministry’s website—1,949 hectares. That is what Parekura Horomia promised iwi 2½ years ago when he was running up and down the country and going on marae, having a boil-up and eating pipi and cockles. That is what he promised them—1,949 hectares. Today, 2½ years later, Parekura Horomia visits iwi on marae up and down the country, but he has not delivered one single square metre of new marine space to any iwi anywhere, and he should be ashamed of that—absolutely ashamed of leading his own people up the garden path.

Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA (Associate Minister of Fisheries) : There is one thing about cultureless people—they make insidious remarks about personalities when they do not even understand what a boil-up is. But I suppose that is where that speaker is lacking in intelligence.

The aquaculture industry’s goal is to be a billion-dollar industry by 2025. That is the Government’s role, and what that member is not stating is that, in the sense of Māori, by January 2008 there is purchase right that the Government can exercise on behalf of Māori. I can tell that person that there are rights in local authorities, and there are issues that have to be managed by them and by central government.

This Government has been very supportive of regional councils. It has allocated $2 million to ensure that the information and resources are there and that the Government’s work programme is quite clear. Both my colleagues Minister Benson-Pope and Minister Hodgson have done well and ensured that after the aquaculture moratorium became inactive, a large number of applications, with regard to many thousands of hectares—and that is where that member has been distorting the truth—had already been notified by councils and were allowed to proceed. With the great support of this Government there has been a real and total surety about aquaculture being a key, integral part of this country going forward.

Certainly, in relation to the moratorium over the last 6 years, the councils and the Ministry of Fisheries have processed over 200 of these applications. That member was making out that there was zero—that there was nothing. But they were in action, and New Zealand has increased the hectarage by nearly 48 percent. It is the fastest growth period to date. That is what has happened, but that member has been making out that nothing has happened.

We have formed the New Zealand aquaculture group, which is really, really going forward and is very thankful for this Government’s support. There is nonsense from that member from up in Whangarei. He wants to be very thankful that this Government has really put those issues forward—issues that had been put asunder by some people’s red-neckery—in relation to what should be happening in the fisheries area.

I want to tell the Committee that fisheries development in this country is well supported by this Government, and, certainly, that member from Whangarei should be more supportive, because we know that at the end of the day he is always in silent and secret negotiations with us to make sure that the aquaculture platform and the fisheries platform in this country are well preserved, and only this Government can do that.

• Vote agreed to.

KATHERINE RICH (National) : I rise to speak on education in this debate and, although I am not very good at joke-telling, I have to relate a particular joke that is doing the rounds of Opposition corridors at the moment. It is: what does Steve Maharey have in common with Corporal Apiata? The answer is that they are both going to take on VC roles very soon.

If we look at the estimates this Minister has put in place, we are shown that his focus has not been on the education portfolio. His focus has been on finding additional vocational opportunities for himself, as opposed to dealing with some of the tough issues relating to truancy, problems with student behaviour in classrooms, poor academic attainment, and problems with literacy and numeracy.

We have to go only as far as the early childhood education sector to realise why this Minister is seeking other vocational opportunities in the tertiary sector rather than concentrating on fixing early childhood education problems. We need look only at the Government’s 20 hours free policy, which was touted and promoted in July 2005 with all the fanfare and fervour of the election. The Government started off by saying that all 3 and 4-year-old children would be receiving 20 free hours come July 7, but what was presented to and discussed at our select committee was something quite different—only a fraction of 3 and 4-year-olds were to receive free early childhood education. The numbers started to slip and slide, and slither around, from “definitely” 86,000 children to “nearly” that number, and then we heard that “perhaps” 92,000 would have access. But on this side of the Chamber we understand totally that there is a difference between having access and actually receiving free education. So when the numbers were rolled out in July the reality was quite different, and we saw that 27,000 3 and 4-year-olds had no place to go.

There was the interesting story of a guy who searched around in Auckland for a centre in his area. He found one that was providing 20 free hours, but the waiting list was 3½ years long. Most parents plan their children with some forethought, but I do not know a single parent in New Zealand who would think to put his or her child down for 20 hours free, 6 months before that child was conceived. It is just utterly ridiculous.

Then we saw the moving feast in relation to how much parents would actually save from this policy. The Prime Minister told parents it would be $90 a week. The Minister in the chair, Steve Maharey, has started to use the figure of $60 a week, and today in the House he would not explain the big gap in those figures. But then we heard the view of New Zealand Kindergartens that its parents would save less than $20 a week. Once again, we see the difference between the puff, the bluster, and the weasel words of the election compared with what was actually presented as part of the Budget and reviewed as part of the estimates process.

A few days before the policy went live we asked how many centres would take it up and the Minister could not say. He could not say how many centres were going to take it up or how many children were going to take it up. Even when we look at the figures that are presented today, we cannot bank on those figures because there has been double counting. We have centres on websites reportedly offering the service, but then they ring up and say no—they are not providing the service, at all. This is an example of how to spend $313 million but actually please nobody. It does not even make a difference to increasing participation rates within our most vulnerable sectors. My colleague Paula Bennett raised the issue of the 10,000 forgotten kids who are not in early childhood education at all. This kind of blanket approach does not make one skerrick of difference to those kids who are currently getting nothing at all.

Within this process we were hoping for some solutions to some of the really important problems in education. For example, we asked the Minister to explain why truancy has increased by 41 percent in just the last 4 years. We now have 30,000 kids each week who play hookey from school. Some of those kids will be taking just a day or so off, but we have a disturbing, growing trend in the number of serial and long-term truants who are not learning because they are not at school. So there is nothing for them. There is nothing to deal with the disturbing and challenging behaviours that our teachers are facing on a daily basis. It is no wonder that the suspensions and stand-down rates are rocketing. We have seen the Minister come out and make a blanket change to exemptions. He gives no answer to some very difficult issues in education, just rhetoric and bluster.

Hon BRIAN DONNELLY (NZ First) : I would like to draw the Committee’s attention to page 424 of the Estimates of Appropriations, which refers to performance measures for primary schools. In particular, it talks about schools remaining open for the delivery of curriculum, in terms of the national curriculum education guidelines. The performance standards for 2007-08 are the equivalent of 394 half-days per annum in the 2007-08 financial year. I raise this point because that will be an absolute impossibility for achievement by the schools themselves. Already the Minister has gazetted that instead of schools having to be open for 394 half-days in 2007, they will have to be open for only 386 half-days. In 2008 they will have to be open for 384 half-days. Over the next 4 years, in fact, 16 full days of primary education will be lost to primary students in this country.

I raise the point because there is a huge body of evidence that shows that engaged academic learning time is a critical criterion in educational achievement. I know that the Minister will respond by saying that compared with our OECD partners we have a very good record, etc. In fact, our school day is not a long one, largely because we established it, back in 1877, so that the children could go home to do the milking, or allow mum to go off to do it. We still have that “qwerty” problem within the system as it stands. But we need to be comparing ourselves not just with OECD countries but with emerging economies, and certainly with the emerging economies of Asia. I can assure the Minister that in our schools we come nowhere near to having the sorts of hours of engaged academic learning time achieved by those economies. I believe that this is a considerable point of interest, because parents would be horrified to know that 16 days have actually been knocked off their children’s learning time over the next 4 years.

On the other side, there are some positives in terms of keeping children at school. There is an almost half-million dollar increase in district truancy services, and ENROL, the school student enrolment register, will be extended to all schools. This will certainly pick up many students who presently fall through the gaps. However, continued concern has to be raised about the extremely high number of early school-leaving exemptions that are taking place. They have skyrocketed. One of the reasons mooted for it is the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) league tables. In fact, schools, knowing full well that they are going to confront the NCEA league tables on the basis of the number of students enrolled and that they have a number of students who are not achieving too well, are actually taking the step to go for the early school-leaving exemption. We consider that that needs to be looked at very carefully.

On the other side of the picture, the Government is saying that we need to increase participation in early childhood education—while it is cutting down participation or engaged academic learning time, in the early childhood education sector it is trying to increase that. A lot of noise has been made about the 20 free hours policy. But we have to think back. Our free education policy has been in place since 1877. Schools still ask for donations from parents for optional extras. I have to say that National was more than happy to bounce off the policy of New Zealand First in relation to free health care for under-sixes, which in fact was not free in the sense that doctors were able to ask for additional costs as well. But National still used that policy and praised us for it.

But here is the point: in terms of performance standards we have gone from $586 million for early childhood education last year to $755 million. That is a big increase, and one would hope that with that big increase would come an increase in the number of hours that students receive. In fact, in 2006-07 we budgeted for between 120 million and 128.2 million hours of participation. For the additional funding, we have actually reduced that predicted amount to between 118 million and 125.4 million hours. In other words, we are getting less output as a result. However, for those people who are still saying that there is nothing in this 20 free hours policy, I point out that some of the figures have increased the rates quite significantly.

PAULA BENNETT (National) : I stand to speak to the education estimates and to the Minister. I suppose that the member who spoke just before me, Brian Donnelly, was talking about the 20 free hours policy. I was sitting here thinking that the Minister must have been absolutely kicking himself for having put so much effort—and this was the Government’s big announcement for 1 July—into something that it has had no pick-up on whatsoever. The public out there are saying that they simply do not believe the Minister. They simply do not believe that the initiative is free. They simply do not believe that 20 free hours early childhood education is accessible for all the children who were promised it. As a consequence, although some are saving a little bit of money most are unable to access the 20 free hours early childhood education.

I start by asking the Minister a question. How much will parents save if their child is one of the 27,000 who are missing out on this subsidy? For example, if their child is one of the 49 percent of Auckland children who do not have access to 20 free hours childcare, what does that actually mean for them? The estimates can talk about the millions being spent and how that money is being put in, but the reality is that children are not getting 20 free hours early childhood education, and it is not accessible for all 3 and 4-year-olds.

We certainly heard the question of what the National Party would do when in Government. That is actually a fairly fair question, and it is one we are looking at addressing over the upcoming months. But the real concern to us is the mess that we will have to clean up. We just need to look at what has happened with tertiary education and the fact that Dr Cullen had to step in, at what is going on with broadcasting, and at the haphazard policy made on the hoof in an election campaign when a party is worried about its future, and what we see is a mess. What we see is a fraud, and what we see is children actually missing out. When we see that sort of thing and look at our own policy, we say that what we want to be doing is addressing something that is honest and something that we really can deliver to all those children who need it.

Of real concern to us when we look through the estimates—and my colleague Katherine Rich mentioned this—is those children who are missing out now. The Government, in its early days, used to talk about those vulnerable children who are not accessing early childhood education. The Government used to actually count them, to care about them, and to give a damn, but we do not even hear about them any more. So when we bandy around numbers of 92,000 children, and the Minister sometimes says they are the eligible children, we say that, no, they are not, and the Minister knows it. The 92,000 children are the children who are currently accessing some form of early childhood education. They are not the only children who are eligible, so it those other children whom we should be most concerned about. It is those children who then do not go to school, and who then become statistics. It is those children who then become truants and who then are the most vulnerable later on in terms of becoming statistics in our prisons, and that sort of thing. There is research proving that.

So this Government no longer talks about those vulnerable children and no longer speaks about actually addressing participation rates in early childhood education. And, yes, those rates are high—early childhood education participation rates are up at the level of 92 percent—but a huge number are accessing it for only a short period of time. So we no longer talk about participation. We now talk about making it cheaper, and we talk about subsidies. We bandy around numbers of savings for parents of $90 a week, then savings of $60, then the Minister says $30 to $35 in the House today, then we have kindergarten associations saying that it might be up to $20 a week. Parents might be saved a bit of money, and good on them—all people need a bit of extra cash in their hands each week—but what about those kids who need early childhood education the most? And what about those kids who are not participating in any sort of early childhood education? Where in this Budget are they addressed? Where are the estimates that say that we will support them?

How is the promoting of participation going? What about the programme, set up by this Government, that is supposed to be about going out and talking to those Māori and Pacific Island communities and getting them involved? How many of their contracts have been terminated? How many of their contracts have not been rolled over and have been terminated, purely because they were not addressing what actually needed to be addressed, and there was not a level of accountability?

ALLAN PEACHEY (National—Tamaki) : I take the few moments allotted to me to speak in the estimates debate to refer to what I have described in other writings as the silent catastrophe in our schooling system. I express some pleasure—some satisfaction—that as a result of the work of the Education and Science Committee and the debate in this House, some recognition is now finally coming that for too many of our children the collapse in the teaching of numeracy and literacy is having a negative effect on their lives and a negative effect on the prosperity and growth of this country.

Nobody can argue with the statistics. We all know—and there is no point in disputing it—that something like 30 percent of our children are not learning to read, write, or calculate at a level sufficiently high enough for them to function fully in the adult community. That has consequences for our economy. It also has consequences for the strength of our democratic system. We cannot ignore that.

After 60 years of compulsory universal education and schooling in New Zealand, we have reached a point where a third of our children, for a variety of reasons, are not learning the basics that they need to function in our community. At least we no longer brush that under the carpet, and at long last we are seeing some recognition of the need to challenge that problem.

I caution the Government not to fall into the trap that educationalists have been falling into for years, and that is to say: “Look at how good the top end is. Look at how good our best students do.” Nobody knows better than I how good our best schools are, how good our best schoolteachers are, and how good our best students are. However, that is not a solution and not an answer for those children who are not experiencing success. It is vital that in this debate we move beyond cheap point-scoring excuses and that sort of thing and actually make some sort of commitment in this House that it is in the national interest of this country that we earnestly and urgently address the failure in learning of 30 percent of our children. We should be capable of doing that.

If I could offer the Minister a little bit of advice, I would suggest that everywhere where the centralised answer lies in bureaucracy, and where an approach of appointing more officials has been used, very little progress has been made. The most difficult change to bring about in a schooling system is in the relationship between individual teachers and children in the classroom. We will not solve this problem for our children until we find a way of addressing that issue. One of the first things we have to do is to develop greater respect for the work of the schoolteacher. It is far too easy, far too often, to expect the school to be a panacea for all of the community’s worries. Then, when that panacea does not develop, we make the school a scapegoat.

This issue of literacy and numeracy will be solved only in the quality of the relationships that are established in classrooms between schoolteachers and children. It is the same with the truancy issue. Children begin to truant from school because they become disengaged from learning. It is teachers who engage children in learning. I regret to say it, but too many of our children are imprisoned in schools where the expectations are not high enough, where the excuses are rampant, and where the ideology is more important than whether children are learning. We have to get to a point where school teaching in New Zealand once again attracts its share of the top third of graduates coming through our universities. There are principals out there and people involved in teacher training and teacher recruitment who will tell us that that is not happening.

Hon STEVE MAHAREY (Minister of Education) : In reflecting on the estimates vote, I begin at the beginning of where I think everybody has got to today. I think we have a lot of agreement about education at the present time. I listened to Brian Donnelly—whom I listen to a great deal on these issues—and I heard a bit of dispute about the issue of the number of hours that kids will spend in the classroom. I will come back to that in a second, because I think there is a way of relieving that issue in the member’s mind.

I hear a lot of reinforcement about what we are doing in education right now. I do not think anybody would say that everything is perfect in education, but we are on the right road. I want to come back to that road in a little while. I listened to Katherine Rich, and I heard, really, an endorsement around the issues of early childhood education. She might not like the way it is running at the present time—there is debate about that, of course—but I do not hear any real dispute from Katherine Rich or from Paula Bennett about the need for us to have a strategy around early childhood education and for young people to be in education.

Whether or not we see the policy working explicitly as it should right now—and we will have different views on that—I think we all agree that this country ought to commit itself to having 3 and 4-year-olds in education. That is the big step forward here. We are saying that taxpayers now want to pay for education in that preschool area because they can see it makes a big difference to one’s later educational career and then, hopefully, to one’s work or whatever one might do. That is agreed; I can see that as I look around the Chamber. We will argue about details, I am sure, until the cows come home, but we agree on that.

I listened to Mr Peachey—he is also someone whom I listen to a lot; he has standing in the educational area because of his career as a principal—and I heard him say it is great that we are talking about literacy and numeracy now. He said it is great that we are starting to get on top of the issue in terms of the way we teach literacy and numeracy. We can see some real turn-round in that for Māori, and that we are seeing some real results in terms of their achievement in this area. Mr Peachey points to the fact that we have to focus on effective teaching. This is the key to making sure we make a difference in our education system. The key is not a bureaucrat sitting in a building here in Wellington; it is what happens in that interface between the learner and the teacher that matters. I hear that point coming through from Mr Peachey.

So I hear a lot of agreement around the Chamber. The road we have felt ourselves going down over the last 4 or 5 years I have labelled “personalising learning”. This is all about trying to have a 21st century education system that fits with the needs of young New Zealanders today, which means, in a nutshell, that they have to be active learners and not have content driven into them, which is what happened to most of us in this Chamber. That is the way education was for most of us. We sat in big classes in front of the teacher, and the teacher put as much content as he or she possibly could into us each day, and we had to give it back in exams.

We know that that approach will not work in this century. We know that it will not solve the problems with literacy and numeracy. It will not motivate students. It will not make our schools the kind of schools they should be. The right approach is all about getting active participants in the learning process. That is what personalising learning is all about, and that is the direction we are going in. I hope that between us we can consolidate that kind of learning, whether it is in early childhood, primary, secondary, or tertiary education, because that will make us No. 1 in education.

Someone—I think it was Mr Donnelly—mentioned the Asian systems. Now, frankly, as he knows, they look to us. They may have longer school days, but they recognise that what they are doing in Asia at the present time is building last century’s form of education. They are building large schools. They are doing what we did last century—stuffing content into the heads of their students. They know there is a real problem with that. They need creative, innovative, self-motivated students to come out of there, and they cannot get them from that education system. So as much as I admire a lot about what I see in Asia at the present time, as big education systems are rapidly put together, one would have to say that Asia is starting to look to countries like us and ask how at least parts of their systems can be made more innovative. We are on the right track. We ought to argue vigorously, as we are doing, about how that track should be followed. It would be awful to see it change now that we have basically figured out which way to go.

I say to Katherine Rich that I have been following some of the statements around the National Party education policy. I notice, for example, that John Key is saying we have a very successful education system, and that is great to hear. We hear from Katherine Rich that she does not want to change much about the education system if she ever gets the chance to be in a position to do so.

One little thing that does worry me is hearing John Key on Campbell Live saying: “We don’t want a monopoly on education by any particular provider.” I think one of our strengths is that we do have a public education system that is dominating the education system. I like that. I think it has worked for the Swedes and it has worked for us, and I think we should stay with that but, of course, allow an enormous amount of innovation within that system. That is what we should be trying to do. Therefore, I welcome the fact that Katherine Rich has been saying she does not agree with the notion of vouchering the system, or privatising the system, or breaking it up in that way. Given the performance of Mr Ryall in defeating Mr Key around the health legislation recently, I am hoping that Katherine Rich will have the same success in defeating John Key around education.

I go back to the estimates. I think they are enormously successful. If we go through them and look at the amount of money that is going into the early childhood strategy, we see that it is an enormous amount, and the 20 free hours policy is just part of it. We are also professionalising teachers, upgrading centres, and building ourselves an education sector in that pre-school area. We will get there by 2012, and these estimates make sure that we go down that road.

People have talked about keeping students at school. I thank Mr Donnelly for pointing out that there are really good strategies in here—but not enough. We can see that do have a problem here when we compare ourselves with other countries around the world, but we are now fully committed to keeping kids at school until they are 16 and getting them qualified. There are many initiatives in this Budget that will help with that. There is help for parental involvement. We know that if we can keep parents, communities, and whānau involved in education the kids get a better education. The Team-Up initiative and Te Mana campaign, for example, which we will continue to fund, are having enormous success.

We have had discussions about technology and technology teachers, and, once again, this Budget is about trying to get more technology teachers and get the curriculum right. I am sure the House will be absolutely delighted with the new curriculum. It pumps up that technology area as it ought to do. We have looked at leadership issues, particularly in the areas of trying to provide more support for principals and for aspiring principals, because we need a lot of young people to come into those kinds of positions.

Literacy and numeracy issues are being addressed in this Budget—once again, with new funding—and National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) issues are being addressed. We have, of course, made some good changes to NCEA. I think we now have a quality assessment system, and I see that people around the country are now beginning to applaud what we have and get in behind it because it is the right way to go.

We have tried to do more for Māori. We have provided more resources for special education, and there is more in the operations grant for all schools. Right across the education system we are doing more around issues to do with behaviour, and we have tried to assist with that. We have tried to make sure we have more information going out to parents. We have the huge Mission-On initiative, which runs across sport, health, and education. We have done more in the area of staffing ratios with students. We have done more for teacher supply. We have done more for information and communications technology.

We have changed the school dates a little. To ease the member’s mind, I point out we have done that because that beginning part of the year with Waitangi Day is an area of the school year that is not used efficiently, and, really, that stop-start approach was not doing a great job. If we can get started on a day after Waitangi Day for most kids, they will get on with it. Schools that want to start earlier can do so. There is flexibility there, as well. We have been doing more for boys’ learning. We have been trying to make sure that the curriculum is going to come through soon. We have, as I said, worked on the technology area. We have got more coming through for Pasifika, where we have to do a whole lot more at keeping young people at work, and we have more coming through in apprenticeships.

I turn my attention to the tertiary area. There is $89 million to strengthen the international competitiveness of our universities; $40 million for change in the sector; $21 million in operating funding, and $55 million in capital funding. There is $35 million to support areas such as polytechnics and wānanga, $6 million for building research capability in wānanga, and $53 for industry training and apprenticeships. All those kinds of things are illustrated in this Budget. It is a hugely comprehensive, forward-looking Budget, right across from the early childhood sector to the tertiary sector.

I see that Colin King wants to rise in a moment to talk, and I know he has a lot of good things to say about education as well. But I applaud the fact that underneath our debates we have agreement on education. We will differ on the detail, but I am very pleased today to be able to say that I hear around the House a broad agreement for the direction, and that is great. We should settle that in, get a 21st century education system, not change direction, invest in the things that make a real difference, and argue about the details. I welcome that. I will sit down, and I am sure I will hear a bit of that argument about detail now.

COLIN KING (National—Kaikoura) : It is a privilege to stand and speak to the education estimates. After listening to that sort of machine-gun round-up by the Minister, I thought it was sad that he did not talk about the Correspondence School, because if he goes into the estimates he will see that there has been a $1.6 million reduction in funding for it. That is hugely serious. The Correspondence School has had a $1.6 million reduction in its budget, and in effect over 1,000 full-time equivalent students rely on that school. They have no other choice. The Correspondence School is iconic, and yet it has been treated rather shabbily by successive Ministers of Education.

Another point that I am really concerned about, and which I do not feel the Minister has come to grips with, is the fact that the supervisors, the people who take responsibility for ensuring that correspondence students do get their education—often the parents and the carers—are totally undervalued. They have not actually had consideration given to their contribution to students’ education since 1985. I would urge the Minister to seriously look at that issue, so that we do not have to do it when we are in Government. That is one point.

It is also very concerning, when the heart and soul of the Correspondence School are the parents, to see that as an incorporated society the parents association cannot be sure that it will be allowed to have a conference this year—it may not be able to have its annual general meeting. The association is completely dependent on how that money is dished out by the Correspondence School itself. That is a shocking situation. It disadvantages an enormous number of rural, isolated people and other people who choose to have their children educated by correspondence, be it because of their preference for special group education, and so forth. I just want to put that out to the Minister. I think he has completely missed the point. I do not blame him entirely. I blame the previous Minister, Mallard, who—

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): The member will use the Minister’s full name.

COLIN KING: —Mr Mallard, and I take that point on board.

Moving on to the technology curriculum, which is of special interest to me, I think it is a shame to hear the Minister talk about it being all hunky-dory and all sorted. It is good to see that in the second cut of the draft curriculum, such words as “doing”, “producing”, and “making” things are now being used. However, I believe that we are missing an enormous golden opportunity around the technology curriculum. Very, very few trades and skills in the workforce today are not highly sophisticated and do not require enormous amounts of design and solutions, and the technology curriculum should be a natural fit for that sort of thing. We need to be able to find, as my learned colleague Allan Peachey said, inspiring teachers. I do not think that at the moment we are actually putting in front of our children in the technology curriculum teachers who can totally inspire them. I think the Government is being a bit deficient in that direction, in that it has not done enough to attract and retain the right people, who can add tremendous value to a balanced education.

Education is very much like a diet: one has to have balance. Just because somebody enjoys Macbeth, that does not mean that person will not enjoy getting his or her hands into something and producing it. It is a tragedy to see that effectively the technology curriculum has been rendered down to a situation where one can draw a scone but never get to bake it, or one can explain and describe how to make a cart, but never actually get down to welding and bending the metal to produce one.

But the overarching problem that confronts education—and it is sad to think we would give the impression that we have got it sorted—concerns literacy and numeracy. The message we are hearing from inside industry training organisations is that the pesple who present themselves as candidates, be it as modern apprentices, adult employees, or whatever else, do not have the skills to reach the necessary standards in literacy and numeracy. Fundamentally, we have to ask ourselves whether we have really progressed very far along in that area. When we look at the amount of funding that has been directed towards that issue from the tertiary education budget, we see it is growing and growing.

When we hear about the social problems emanating out of parts of New Zealand and about the gang culture, I would say there is an enormous amount of work to do. When we look at the level of truancy that is occurring at the moment, and when we hear such learned experts as Stuart Middleton talk about some 20,000 people who are neither in education nor in employment when they leave school, we know that a tremendous amount of work needs to be done. I agree with the Minister that there is an understanding of the value of education. As far as the performance goes of the Government that is in the House at this time, I believe that my colleagues have clearly dismantled any notion that it has achieved anything at all. Thank you.

• Vote agreed to.

Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (National—Port Waikato) : It gives me great pleasure to speak on this vote. I believe that it is a very, very important vote, as was suggested by the Government back in 2005. This year the vote for the non-departmental budget was $644 million, but in 2005 in the Speech from the Throne the Governor-General said that science innovation, research and development, was critical to economic growth in New Zealand. What was extraordinary was that in the next Budget $1 billion—probably $1.5 billion—was put into the Working for Families project, which is a project that will cement in welfare dependency in New Zealand; another $1 billion was put into interest-free student loans, which will also cement in welfare dependency; and a mere $19.4 million was put into science research and development. So on the one hand the Labour Government was saying that research, science, and technology were critical to economic growth, but on the other hand it was doing very little in that area.

What we do know is that right throughout the tenure of the Labour Government investment into research, science, and technology, as a percentage of GDP, has remained the same at about 0.55 percent of GDP, when the OECD average is about 0.68 percent. The Minister might be sitting there thinking: “Ah, but this year we have invested, through one of the other portfolios, a significant tax credit to stimulate the private sector.”, but Labour has not done the fundamentals—that is, to ensure that we have a simple low-tax system to ensure that we have a flexible labour market and an optimal regulatory system. That is just as important in science research and development as it is in anything else. Both the Agricultural Compounds and Veterinary Medicines Act and the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act need review as scientists up and down the country are saying that there are blockages to their research or to their efforts to commercialise projects because of difficulties with those two Acts. There is no doubt that the whole regime, right from the very beginning—from basic research to commercialisation of science—is not operating optimally under this Government.

One of the things I particularly wanted to talk about is the huge compliance costs imposed on scientists in New Zealand at this time. A couple of weeks ago Professor Jacqueline Rowarth, who is a professor at Massey University, wrote how bureaucrats are taking a bigger slice of the research budget. She reported how Neville Jordan, the President of the Royal Society of New Zealand, had noted, in her words, that 60 percent of funding was being eaten up by the system. In actual fact I do not think it was quite as much as that, but certainly the figures were a substantial amount. The Ministry of Research, Science and Technology and the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology both say that their compliance costs are less than 3 percent, but it is the researchers themselves who are having to undergo enormous work to get a successful application through, and it is there that the costs are taking place.

There is no doubt that the system, as designed by Labour in the last 6 to 7 years, is, as the Minister admits, extremely inefficient. We should have a situation where the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology is a clear policy body, and the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology is an efficient, lean funder whereby compliance costs are kept to an absolute minimum. Yet in this country we have the reality of extraordinary compliance costs imposed on our researchers right throughout the country.

It is not only in the field of Crown research institutes and universities; we have just seen the fiasco with the centres of research excellence whereby under this Government only one new centre of research excellence was awarded tenure—I am not sure whether it was for 5 or 6 years—but only one centre, out of 26, received this award. It was regarded as an absolute fiasco by the Otago University vice-chancellor, Professor David Skegg. The next in line, Professor White, said that the weakness was in the process used to make the core selection, that much of the process was confused, and that aspects of the selection framework left them concerned. What I really think is that these are all examples of how this Labour Government has left us with huge compliance costs and inefficiencies in an area critical to our economy, an area that the Government itself has admitted is important, yet it has failed miserably.

• Vote agreed to.

CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui) : It is interesting to look back from the last election to the present day at the current state of policing and at some of the issues that have arisen in this portfolio, given the promises that were made prior to that election. We know that prior to the last election, for instance, the National Party said: “We need to have a radical increase in police numbers. We think it will be about 1,000, but we will do it in consultation with the police administration.” Labour said: “Rubbish!”. New Zealand First said: “We think we need to take police numbers up by about half.”, so New Zealand First was going to have another 3,500 police members. Labour said that was rubbish. In fact, the Prime Minister said that anyone who was talking about lifting police numbers in the thousands was incredible. She reckoned those people were not even on the right planet.

The problem with that little assessment, of course, was that the public of New Zealand agreed that the police numbers needed to go up. In spite of all the assurances that have been given, and in spite of the assurances on pledge card after pledge card that youth crime would be dealt with and that burglaries would be dealt with, the fact is that that was not done.

So what happened when the issue gained some traction with the public? Well, Labour decided it would contribute 250 community cops. It did not do any assessment on that; it just sort of plucked that number out of the air and said it would contribute 250 community cops. There was no consultation. Then what happened? Well, in the words of Dr Cullen, I guess, they won, we lost, eat that.

But Labour needed a coalition partner, so it went along to New Zealand First and was pleased to speak to my colleague Ron Mark, and New Zealand First went into bat. Without any consultation Labour again came back to the public and said: “We’ll give you 1,000 more cops. That’s it, the coalition deal is signed, and we’re up and running as a Government.” The problem was, of course, that Labour never consulted the police administration as to how long it would take to get the recruits, how that would affect standards, what the flow-on effects would be for justice and the courts, and all the rest of it. That was all there was to it—1,000 new cops.

Well, what has happened since then? What has happened is that these 1,000 new cops were all going to be front-line cops. Initially, New Zealand First said they would all be front-line cops, and Labour said that it did not know about that, and that there would be support staff, and all the rest of it. Eventually Labour got its act together and said there would be 1,000 new front-line cops.

In response to question for written answer No. 8496 to the Minister of Police, we found out that of the first tranche of these 1,000 new cops—there were 353 of them—only a third would actually be front-line cops. One-third of them are recorded as being front-line general duties responders. Others are road police, some are Criminal Investigation Bureau and support staff, some are specialists, some are recruiters, some are analysts, some are prosecutors, some are working with Child, Youth and Family, and 27 are “other”, so they are not even described, at all. What they are not is front-line cops.

I wonder whether that is what Mr Mark actually thought he was getting when that deal was negotiated. But we cannot find any answers to the questions asked about correspondence between New Zealand First and the Minister of Police, as to where these front-line cops were coming to and where they were going. We asked: “Has there been any consultation between New Zealand First and the Minister?”. We got back the answer: “None.”

In recent days and weeks there has been a question over the quality of the recruits that are being brought into the Royal New Zealand Police College to make up these 1,000 police. I have to say that it really hacks me off that as soon as one even raises the question, one is seen as defecating on the New Zealand Police. Well I can tell members, from experience, that the New Zealand Police are tough enough to handle it, and it is interesting to note that the New Zealand Police are getting more concerned than certainly the Minister and anybody else.

Wayne Annan, who is the head of human resources in the New Zealand Police, says that the new recruits are fine, and that some comparative testing has been done between current recruits at the police college, recruits who are yet to arrive at the police college, and cops who are already serving, and everything is fine. Well, that study was reviewed by Senior Sergeant Iain Saunders, who seems to have been on a commissioned officers’ course at the police college. He found that there were a whole lot of problems with that. He found that the norm groups fluctuated, and in one statement he said: “We don’t even seem to know what we are measuring and predicting about the person or in the job, and we are just taking the best guess at present.” Well, that is flash!

Hon PHIL GOFF (Minister of Defence) : Chester Borrows came into this Chamber and said he wanted to talk about the current state of policing. Well, I will tell him something about the current state of policing in New Zealand: it has never been better. It is much better than when that member was a policeman in the dying days of the National Government, when the police numbers were not increased; contrary to the promise of 500 additional cops, National cut them. That is what it did; it cut them.

The then Treasurer, a guy by the name of Bill English—we have heard his name mentioned before—put in place a police review that was to cut 285 non-sworn members and 95 senior sworn positions. This is the man who is still the spokesperson on finance in the National Party. Members should judge him on what he did. Not only did he cut superannuation for the old folk but also he cut their protection by cutting cop numbers. Chester Borrows knows that. He knows that that is a fact. He knows that police numbers in 1999 were less than the establishment level in 1994—5 years in Government, and National cut police numbers. He knows that the then Commissioner of Police said to the select committee that police morale had never been lower, and that the police force in those days, under the National Government, was the most inexperienced police force since the Second World War.

So what a double standard it is that Chester Borrows comes back into this Chamber now and dumps on his mates in the police force for a bit of cheap political capital. I will tell Chester Borrows what the score is. The score is that last year we recruited 688 additional police officers.

Charles Chauvel: How many?

Hon PHIL GOFF: We recruited 688 additional police officers. What is the morale like? The morale is so good that the attrition rate for the police—[Interruption] Mr Borrows can yell all he likes; he knows that he was talking rubbish. The attrition rate in the New Zealand Police force today is the lowest it has been in 10 years. The recruitment rate is the highest, and the attrition rate is the lowest, at 3.7 percent, when the average for the public sector is 21 percent. So Mr Borrows should not come into this Chamber and say that the state of the police force is bad, because the facts contradict him. He is a supporter of a National Government that slashed police numbers. We in this Labour Government have committed ourselves, along with New Zealand First, to providing 1,250 additional police officers, and we are on track. We are on track because we are recruiting them, and we are on track because the attrition rate is lower. I say to Mr Borrows that the result of that is that people in his electorate are safer, because more police are out on the road. Labour does not talk tough and do the opposite, which is what National did when it was in Government. That was the hypocrisy of that National Government.

Then we can come to the INCIS computer system under the National Government. The sum of $132 million was spent, for what? Absolutely nothing. It was 3 years late, at double the cost, and I say to Mr Borrows that the result of that expenditure of $132 million was that the police had a dog that—as a police officer said at the time—was a dog all right, but it did not even bark. The dog did not bark. That was the result of the absolute incompetence of the National Government in regard to policing. It slashed police numbers after promising to raise them. Bill English was the Minister who was in charge of those cuts.

The investment in the INCIS computer system was the most idiotic investment ever in a computer system—$132 million was flushed down the toilet—and Mr Borrows has the cheek to come into this Chamber and criticise a Government that is putting 1,250 extra police behind desks and out on the road doing the job we require of them. Well, I will let the public judge where the hypocrisy is coming from in this Chamber, but it is obvious to me.

I want to say, in particular, that I welcome the fact that in my home city of Auckland we got 185 extra cops last year, and we will probably get another couple of hundred cops this year, to make our country safer for its people.

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

Hon PHIL GOFF: I shall sum up. Before the break Chester Borrows was on his feet as a member of a party that, when in Government, had a police review that slashed police numbers by nearly 400, and wasted $132 million on a failed computer system, but is now saying that 1,250 new police officers is not a good idea, and that it is not great that we have the lowest attrition rate for the police in 10 years, and the biggest increase in police on the beat and in support for police on the beat that this country has ever seen in its history. I am very proud of what the Minister of Police has achieved in this area.

RON MARK (NZ First) : I cannot allow the comments of Mr Chester Borrows to go unchallenged, because at the end of the day—and I think the comment has been made today—people will be judged not on what they say in this House, not on what they purport to do or say they are going to do, but on what they did while they were in Government, when they had the power, the authority, the ability, and the resources to do something.

It is interesting to hear the criticism over the lack of consultation with the police. Let me just say this to National Party members: the New Zealand First policy in the last election was to double the size of the police force; that is our policy. Over a period of time we intend to double the size of the police force. Given the opportunity to negotiate with the Labour Party, as an incoming Government, as to how we would take the first step to achieve that, we set a target of 1,000 extra front-line police on top of the 250 community service police that the Labour Government had already budgeted for.

It is interesting to hear Mr Borrows talk about the lowering of recruiting standards. The obvious question is whether the police would take an overweight policeman today—yes or no? Are there any overweight policemen in the force today? Yes. Why do the police continue, then, to discriminate against young recruits, when their leadership itself is demonstrating that it is not prepared to undergo the same physical tests that it demands of the young men and women under its command? The great thing about the Ministry of Defence—and Corporal Willy Apiata is a great example—is that people lead by example.

The message I have for any ex-policeman or any current policeman who proposes to be a leader of the police, either as a Minister or as a senior officer in the police, is to get his head around a couple of things. New Zealand First negotiated an extra 1,000 police. Why? Because we believe that is the minimum number that is needed. Our policy is to double the size of the police force, and I ask members not to underestimate our resolve to do that. I say to Chester Borrows that if he comes to the coalition negotiating table after 2008 and he is not prepared to talk about it, he should get out. If he is prepared to come to the coalition table, and he does not want to talk about increasing the size of the police force, he can get out of the room. Likewise, if he comes to the coalition discussion table and is not prepared to talk about crushing gangs, he should get out of the room, because we in New Zealand First would not be interested. If that man wants to be the Minister of Police, if he wants to be in a Government, if he wants to be at the Cabinet table, he has to get his head around the fact that 1,000 is a start.

Speaking of a start, we remind the National Party that 1,000 is only the first pick of it, and the Labour-led Government has agreed to increase recruiting so that by 2010 New Zealand has the same ratio of police per capita as Australia. The question I have for the National Party members is whether, if the Labour Government commits the Budget towards doing that, they will support it. Will the National Party members support it, or are they going to wait until they get into Government in 2008 and do what they did in 1990 and cut the police budget? Are we now hearing about all the inoculation spoken of in The Hollow Men; is the ground being preparedfor the public, so that when National says it will cut the police budget people are prepared for it?

Maurice Williamson is looking at me right now. I know Maurice Williamson because I was in Government when he was a Cabinet Minister. He will have no qualms about cutting the police budget, and neither will Tony Ryall, Bill English, Nick Smith, nor Chester Borrows, because that is what National members did in the past. If members look at this report and the financial review, they will see the one thing that New Zealand First members are pleased with, and that is the increase in police numbers.

The question we now have is whether the National Party will commit towards extending those numbers to give us the same ratio of police per capita as Australia, or will inoculate the public during the next 2 years in preparation for a welshing on, and a cutting of, the police budget. This is the party that pledged an extra 500 police. I ask Mr Borrows to let me show him the National - New Zealand First 1996 coalition agreement. Where was all that great consultation from his front-bench members then, when they agreed to the 500, as written on page 48? I ask him to read it; that is what his party signed up to.

So I tell him not to knock this initiative; it is what the country wants. For a party that is committed to law and order, the first thing it needs to do is to talk to Chief Bratton of the Los Angeles Police Department and to anyone who has seen the success of the zero tolerance policy. We have to have more feet on the beat if we want to make an impact on crime.

CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui) : I turn to the report by Senior Sergeant Iain Saunders, the psychologist who is now a senior sergeant within the police and who works at the Police College. He made some conclusions in relation to recruiting within the police, and his concerns were these: “There are very real developing concerns with incoming recruit populations. No matter how you tint your view of the recent performance of police recruits in training, there is a noticeable growth in the tail of the population and the load being placed on training resources to get them through the course.” He established that there were four deficiencies within the recruiting system as it is at the moment. He says: “Recruit performance and training is”—in bold—“diminishing and has done so markedly since the introduction of the new testing and associated standards. The labour market did not abruptly change at this time nor did the education system or the recruit course measures presented.”

Then he said: “Data reported to recruit training is limited and commonly erroneous, hampering attempts to research recruit performance and training delivery outcomes adequately.” He went on to say: “To review norms periodically is desirable. For it to be as haphazard as it appears is not. This exposes police to risk of staying on thresholds at extremes creeping either up or down depending as to who is put into the sample.” At the end he says: “Criticism of the RTG”—recruit training group—“work in this field is founded on flawed and misrepresented data which has little credibility, leading to the suspicion that the executive are misinformed on the actual position with regards to recruit performance and selection.”

We have to wonder just where the Minister of Police was when that report was delivered to the police’s administration, because when she was spoken to in the media about it she said it was an operational matter and had nothing to do with her. In actual fact, the Minister of Police in that situation is standing in front of the public and holding the police to account, because that is her job. If she does not want to do that job, maybe she should look for something else. The fact is that that is her role. She cannot just hold her hands up and say it is an operational matter, so it has nothing to do with her.

I now just want to touch on another point: the whole issue around the issuing and distribution of the stab-proof vests. We know that the police were guaranteeing to their officers that they would have stab-proof vests and, as Mr Mark has previously said, that that was supposed to be rolled out over 12 months, by the end of 2003—

Ron Mark: 2002, actually.

CHESTER BORROWS: It was promised to be rolled out by 2003 over a 12-month period. Whatever happened, the stab-proof vests did not show up then. We know that last year they were again supposed to be rolled out. We know that initially they were the wrong colour, because someone had decided that stab-proof vests should be fluorescent. The trouble is it is really hard for someone to hide in the bushes and catch baddies if he or she is wearing a fluorescent vest that glows in the dark. Then the police decided that they would make the vests blue—good. Then the vests were in the wrong material, which disintegrated in the sun. Then the police decided that maybe the duty belt should hang off the bottom of the stab-proof vests, so that the capsicum spray, the extendable baton, the torches, the PR24 clip, the radio, and all the rest of the equipment could hang off them. It was a really good idea, but it was not thought of to start with. Then the measurements for the vests were all done wrongly by members of the New Zealand Police, we are told, and not by the contractor.

So now, police officers still do not have the vests. The Minister said that most of them would be rolled out by the end of July. However, the police administration says that 98 percent of them will be rolled out by the end of the year.

We have recently found, of course, that the shirts the police currently wear will not go with the vests because there is a heat problem, apparently. That was not thought of to start with, either. So now, a contract has been let for 35,000 new moisture-wicking breathable shirts to wear under the stab-proof vests. That contract has been let out for 35,000 shirts initially, and then an ongoing 1,000 shirts a month after that. We have no idea of what that will cost, and answers to questions at the select committee and also to written questions indicate that the police have no idea of what that will cost.

If we talk to police officers on the street, they say to us that they cannot wear a raincoat over the stab-proof vest. They cannot wear jerseys over the vest, nor can they wear a duty jacket or a tunic over it. When spoken to about that, the Minister and the administration within the police have said that this is a parallel roll-out of equipment. I am sure that anyone’s view of a parallel roll-out of equipment is that it all gets rolled out together. So before one signs a contract with someone to supply stab-proof vests, one should actually think about things like colour, material, design, size, jackets, duty jackets, and tunics.

Hon PHIL GOFF (Minister of Defence) : There is a real trap that new members of Parliament fall into when they are given portfolio responsibilities they are not ready for, and that is to knock the organisations they are spokespersons for. Here is Chester Borrows, having spent many years in the police, now taking cheap shots at the police, and not just at the police hierarchy but in fact—

Chester Borrows: Name one cheap shot.

Hon PHIL GOFF: He wants me to name one cheap shot. OK, I have a cheap shot right in my hand here. It says: “Police recruiting more criminals”, says Borrows. We recruited, last year—[Interruption] One thing about an ex-policeman is that he should know something about law and order, and order in this House, instead of shriek from his seat in the way he is. I want him to listen to what I am saying, because then he has the right to reply if he chooses.

Last year we recruited 773 people into the Police College. Twenty three of those people—2.9 percent—had been given diversion or a conviction. Of that 23, 17 got diversion. Mr Borrows might want to tell the country that the police are busy recruiting criminals, but I wonder whether Mr Borrows has looked at that list of 23.

Let me give the member examples of what some of those people did. One recruit had been convicted of an assault. What had he done? He had confronted an offender who had burgled his house three times and he had hit him, while waiting for the police to arrive, after the offender laughed at him when he asked for his personal belongings back. That happened 11 years ago when the guy was 20, but Mr Borrows says that this man, 11 years later, is not a fit person to be recruited into the police. Then there is another case of a young student who had stolen a garden gnome one night after a pub crawl. Mr Borrows may be perfect and may not have done anything wrong in his long and prestigious history, but I say that somebody who committed a minor offence like that 11 years ago—

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): I am sorry to interrupt the Minister, but the member on my left should look at Speakers’ rulings 58/4 and 59/1. You must not move to facilitate interjection. If you want to interject, Mr Borrows, you can go back to your own seat.

Hon PHIL GOFF: I could go through the full list of these 23. Here is one—this man, when he was 16, broke off a car aerial. I do not condone that; I think that is a stupid, irresponsible thing to do. He paid the price and did his diversion. But I do not believe that 11 or 12 years later that should be held against the man, and that he should be told that on that ground, and that ground alone, he should not be recruited into the police. Here is another one. A person damaged a bus stop sign. He paid the damages and court costs. Yes, he was convicted—he was one of seven who were convicted. Is that something that should be held against that man forever so that he can never join the police force when he has grown up and developed some maturity?

I say that it is a cheap shot for Chester Borrows to label the police as recruiting criminals, and to tar everybody with that brush, when most of those 23 people received only diversion. They did stupid things because of their youth. So that was a cheap political shot. He asked for an example; I have given him an example.

Chester Borrows: Tell us about the burglaries.

Hon PHIL GOFF: Now he talks about the burglaries. Where are the burglaries on this list?

Chester Borrows: No, because you haven’t disclosed them.

Hon PHIL GOFF: I can read the whole list. There are a couple of careless driving charges here. Somebody hit a child who ran in front of his car. Maybe we should hold that against that person forever. What Mr Borrows did was quite wrong. He saw a chance to score a political point, or so he thought—a cheap shot. He is the man who came into this Chamber before the tea break and said that people would accuse him of defecating on the police force. I say he is absolutely right. That is all he has ever done since he came to this House in relation to the police force. If the member wants to be a spokesperson for the Opposition, he should find the real issues and not make cheap shots. He should not invent things and pretend that the police are there recruiting criminals when the only evidence he can find is a small group of guys who, when they were quite young—in their teens—did something wrong that should not be held against them forever.

I say that the quality of the people we take into the police is at least as good as it was in the days when that member was recruited into the police force. I say that if the member is really worried about the quality of the police force, he should look at some of the people, like Brad Shipton, who were recruited into the police force when National was in Government.

Chester Borrows: Oh, oh!

Hon PHIL GOFF: Yes, I know—he is, hopefully, the exception, and I will say that he is, hopefully, the exception. But I am telling the member that he should not smear those 773 young people who have come into the police force to do the best job they can for New Zealand.

That member’s party, of course, voted against the clean-slate legislation, because its members are all so perfect. They have never done anything wrong in their lives, so they believe that if people make mistakes when they are young kids it should be held against them forever. That is simply a nonsense. I say that the quality of the people—[Interruption] There he is, Mr Chairman, the man who wants to be responsible for holding up the principles of law and order. You have told him once he is not allowed to move seats to interject. He has done nothing but interject ever since you made that call on him, Mr Chairman.

Chester Borrows: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. I have not moved seats in order to facilitate interjections. I was here to speak. I have not moved for any purpose other than to speak from this particular seat, and I have not moved forward from here to facilitate interjection.

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): Thank you. I would like the member to look at the Speakers’ rulings I mentioned, because although the member may have moved to that seat to speak, there comes a time during any debate when that situation is passed over. The member has now completed his speaking rights in this debate, and if he continues to interject then he can be seen to have moved to facilitate interjection.

Hon PHIL GOFF: I say that it is a very good thing that we are recruiting 1,250 additional police officers to provide for the safety and security of New Zealanders. I say that that is a good thing, and I contrast that with the actions of the National Government when Bill English was Treasurer. Contrary to the promise of giving 500 additional police officers, National slashed nearly 400 police officers. That is National in action, not National rhetoric in Opposition. National slashed the police force at that time, and it made the most fundamental errors and caused the most wastage of public funding that anyone could imagine.

I ask Mr Borrows whether he had an INCIS computer in his police station. Can he tell me what was achieved by that $132 million? The member talks about stab-proof vests that might not be the right colour, but the National Party spent $132 million on a computer system that was 4 years overdue before it was scrapped, and that $132 million was simply wasted public funds. It was money that should have gone into providing security for New Zealanders, and it was wasted because of the sheer incompetence of the National Government Ministers of those days, who made fundamental errors in what they did.

I am very pleased that we now have a police force that is growing, and that the worst accusation that an Opposition spokesperson can make is not that we are not recruiting more police officers, but rather, that 23 of those police officers when they were young committed minor infringements against the law. I think that accusation is pathetic.

What has been achieved through the New Zealand police force is something that all New Zealanders should be proud of. Investment has been made in personnel. Investment has been made into equipment. Police cars are at least modern and not years out of date, as they were under the National Government. When the judgment comes, people will judge this Government’s actions and the increase in the number of police officers on the ground against the actions of the last National Government that slashed the police force, broke its promises, and arrogantly assumed that it could get away with that, to its great cost.

• Vote agreed to.

Hon TONY RYALL (National—Bay of Plenty) : We want the Minister of State Services, Annette King, to explain why she has humiliated the Labour Party in Government with her inability to get the trans-Tasman therapeutic products legislation passed through this House despite her repeated assurances that she had the numbers. I have to tell members that the people of New Zealand are pleased that this House will not be passing the costly, bureaucratic, and restrictive piece of legislation that Annette King wanted to foist on this country. We were not prepared to allow her to do that.

What an extraordinary day! Annette King is personally responsible, through her own arrogance, for failing to get the numbers to pass the bill—but whose fault is it? It is my fault. Whose fault was it at question time? It was Bill English’s fault. It was everybody else’s fault except Annette King’s. Let us go through the history of what has happened here. In 2003 the National Party made it absolutely clear that our position on that legislation was represented in a view that was contained in a select committee report. In 2005 the Parliament changed, but Annette King kept going, despite the fact that the numbers she had for her bill had disappeared. She kept going, and she kept spending public money, and it was not until the National Party wrote to her that she even thought she might have to talk to the New Zealand National Party in Opposition about trying to build some support for changes to the trans-Tasman therapeutic products legislation.

So a series of discussions was under way. We asked the Minister to address a number of concerns. She told us stuff that was not true. She told us stuff that could not have been true. We knew it was not true. How could we have reliance, when the Minister was not even telling us the full story about what was going on? We had some months of correspondence. We told the Government that what it was proposing was not enough to address the concerns that we had set out clearly 3 or 4 years earlier and in many, many letters to New Zealanders all around this country. Yet, without assured support in the House, Annette King and the Labour Party introduced the legislation last year, relying on the support of New Zealand First and United Future.

Then the bill went to the select committee, where opinion was split fifty-fifty, and it came back to the House. The Government, under the Minister of State Services, proceeded with a number of discussions to try to build more support, and it was looking at a deal with the parties that usually support it. It is not National that props up this failed, arrogant administration; it is United Future and New Zealand First. Then the Government entered into negotiations with ACT. If the New Zealand First position was so good, why did Annette King not bring it to the National Party? She never said a word to us. If the New Zealand First deal was so good, why did not Labour, ACT, New Zealand First, and United Future support it? That would have given the Government the numbers.

It is because the Government could not get its own people to support it that it finds itself in this position. The Government, which is propped up by the Greens, could not look to the Greens for support. Where is the Government’s haranguing of the Greens for not supporting this? It is all a smokescreen. It is all about blaming the National Party, when it is Annette King and the Labour Government that arrogantly thought they could push this regime on to New Zealanders. We said no; so has the country.

Instead of accepting responsibility for the huge embarrassment and humiliation that has befallen this tired and arrogant Government, Annette King wants to blame the people with whom she never shared New Zealand First’s arrangement. She wants to blame the people who have made it clear for the last 4 years what would be required. She wants to blame John Key, who said for months and months that if she took natural health products out of the legislation National would support it. But Annette King says it is all the National Party’s fault. Well, actually, it is Annette King’s fault, Helen Clark’s fault, and Pete Hodgson’s fault. It is the Labour Party’s fault. They do not realise that as a dying Government they can no longer rule this House with the arrogance they had previously.

If the parties that normally support this Government agreed with that trans-Tasman legislation, it would have been passed. But the Government could not even convince the parties it was in negotiation with. If the New Zealand First deal was that good, we would have seen the legislation passed.

Hon PETE HODGSON (Minister of Health) : I will make a few remarks on behalf of the Minister of State Services, Annette King. I begin by thanking the Green Party members for their involvement in the therapeutic products legislation. I thank them not for their support, because we did not have it, and certainly not for their opposition, but for their consistency. We knew where we stood with the Green Party. We did not agree with the Green Party at all, but the Green Party members always gave their views clearly and consistently, and I want to acknowledge that.

I want to thank and acknowledge the Māori Party for much the same reason. We always knew where we were going with the Māori Party members. They were easy to deal with in that respect, as Annette King reported.

Christopher Finlayson: Spare us the sanctimonious piffle and get on with it.

Hon PETE HODGSON: I will be coming to the member in a moment. He will not enjoy it when I have a bit of a towelling dished up for him. But if he cares to hang around he will hear what I have to say about him.

In respect of United Future, and particularly New Zealand First, we got really good engagement. United Future, unfortunately, became a little disunited during the process. That is hardly the fault of the two who remain. The New Zealand First Party, on the other hand, was quite keen to get a resolution and came up with some quite interesting ideas, including the two-tier approach for complementary medicines. Indeed, the ACT party engaged proactively, and I would like to publicly acknowledge its engagement as its members sought to find a resolution but, indeed, in the event they were not able to support the approach that was coming from New Zealand First.

Within the National Party things are very different. Within the National Party we have Dr the Hon Lockwood Smith, who started the process. He began the process of the treaty signing and all of that. We had the National Party leader, John Key, saying that he was OK with it. The leader of the National Party was OK with it, and Tim Groser, the man who has just interjected on me, was actively in favour of it.

He was actively in favour of it because he understands the foreign affairs implications, the single economic market, and all of that sort of thing, but Tony Ryall was going to cross the floor over it. [Interruption] Who is that?

Hon Member: Chris Finlayson.

Hon PETE HODGSON: Oh well, I have got the wrong guy. I do apologise. Tim Groser, who is not able to be with us, actively supported it because he understood what it meant—that it would be of some consequence to our relationship with Australia; we hope, not too much. But Tony Ryall was going to cross the floor. I am sorry I got the Opposition MPs mixed up, but I know who Tony Ryall is. Tony Ryall is the guy who said that we were arrogant and did not consult, yet for months he has been chipping across the House and saying that National members did not support the legislation. It is like saying: “Come and consult if you like, but we are not supporting it.”

Tony Ryall is the guy who is sort of “one man, one party; we’re not going to consult”. Why? Did he think it was dangerous legislation? No, he did not. He, like every other member of this House, understands that the status quo is not an option. So he does not think it is dangerous legislation. He did think it would be costly for the New Zealand industry, and I think he had a point there, which is why Annette King invited me to pay for half the costs for complementary medicine folk for the first several years to get them through the regulatory process without too much financial impost. Actually, the reason he did what he did was politics—pure politics. He wanted to put his party’s domestic politics ahead of the interests of New Zealand and the New Zealand - Australia relationship, and ahead of the health of New Zealanders.

Of course, not many people die from taking complementary medicines, but some do. Some have already and some might, and that is something we should be concerned about. So I just say to Tony Ryall, who got up and gave a speech about how Annette King behaved arrogantly, that I have never seen more arrogant behaviour than what I have seen from that gentleman on this legislation, and that is where I think the matter might rest.

• Vote agreed to.

Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) : I once again thank the National Party whips for giving me a speaking slot somewhere between 4 in the afternoon and around 9 p.m., because, as the whips well know now, that is drive time in Auckland—up to about 9 o’clock—and people are locked, blocked, and stopped in their cars.

I want to focus on only one thing, because Annette King gave me the entrée to focus on this the other day in the House. She brought in a graph about spending on roading and then she realised that it was not as complimentary as she thought. She did not table it and she ran away without it. So I have had the graph drawn up again, and I will explain to people exactly what it means.

First of all, I will give a bit of a compliment—that is, I will say that the spending on roading for this Budget is excellent. There we go; we have finally got to a point where it is excellent. But what I am really, really getting a bit peeved with is Labour’s view that when National was in Government it did not spend anywhere near as much as Labour did, and that Labour has spent a lot more on roading. So I have gone back and I now have a graph here, and I want members to focus—and with it being the first day of televised Parliament, I hope it is showing off my make-up and my hairdo at the same time. But here is a graph and I hope that everyone can see it.

Members will see there are some blue bars, there is a purple bar, and there are some red bars. That is how much road spending, as a percentage of GDP, occurred during the 9 years of the previous National Government, and a part-year that National partly funded because we did the Budget for it before the 1999 election as it was a June year. Then the red bars are road spending as a percentage of GDP spent by the Labour Government. If we look at the last one, we see that, yes, it is good. Let us give some credit where it is due: the last bar has got to 1.18 percent of GDP. But I want the Committee to know that in the first 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years—5 full years; not the first 6 months up to June, but the first 5 long, full years—of the Labour Party in Government, the actual total spending on roading was less as a percentage of the GDP of the economy than it was under any of the years of the previous National Government.

I hear Labour members say that spending has gone up. In fact, I made that comment on Radio New Zealand National when the Budget came out. I said that spending was up. But spending on roading is up every year. Annette King made a joke about it and said that I was wrong, that it was not true, and so on. But I have the graph here for members to look at, and members will see that the single line is actually the dollar funding, not the percentage of GDP. The single line is the amount of money spent on roading and—hello—it does drop, only once. Only in 1 year does the actual amount of money spent on roading drop—that is, during the first full year of the Labour Government. The only year that money for road spending dropped in absolute terms was the first full year of the Labour Government. So let us call this programme tonight Mythbusters. Let us get into busting the myth that Labour has spent more on roads.

I have been really struggling to get hold of a particular transport Minister, because I think that Labour has had more Ministers of Transport than we on this side have had hot meals, during its term in office. I think it is seven transport Ministers, or maybe eight.

Hon Member: No!

Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON: Oh yes, there have been. Let us go there. Mr Hodgson was one; he will remember. Let us go through them. It started with Mark Gosche, then went to Paul Swain, then went to Pete Hodgson, then went to David Parker, then I think it flicked back to Pete Hodgson, and then it went to Annette King—

Hon Pete Hodgson: No, no.

Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON: No, no—the member took it over for a while after David Parker—plus we have Harry Duynhoven, plus we have Judith Tizard. If we keep adding them up, I think we would come up with nine. It is unbelievable, but there are the facts. Unlike Annette King, who would not table the graph, I will seek leave at the end of this speech to table it because, if anything, the Government has done the right thing in this Budget year. It has committed what I think is a realistic sum of money to the road account. I welcome it, I congratulate the Government on it, and I give Labour an assurance that National will carry on with it.

Here is the joke. At the last election we had a billboard, with red and blue. On the red side it had: “What’s your petrol tax for?”, and it listed hip-hop tours, twilight golf, singalong with Charlie, wānanga, Treaty lawyers, and so on. On the blue side there was just one word: “Roads”. I know that the Greens do not like the word; they cannot even say the word “roads”, but if they worked with me closely they could say it. I ask them to say “roads”—come on, it is not hard. Those members could learn to love roads, because New Zealand does not have enough of them.

I seek leave to table a graph showing the percentage of spending on land transport as a percentage of GDP.

• Document, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.

RON MARK (NZ First) : I seek leave to table a statement made by Peter Brown that shows quite clearly that when New Zealand First and National were in coalition Government, New Zealand First tried to put all roading taxes into roads and Mr Maurice Williamson opposed it.

• Document not tabled.

Hon HARRY DUYNHOVEN (Minister for Transport Safety) : I am delighted that the graph that Maurice Williamson tabled is exactly as I expected. The graph is a fraud. It is the usual fraud that Maurice Williamson puts out, as with the last graphic table, which was the road toll. This graph is at 1.1 percent here. Down here it is at 0.8 percent. The baseline of this graph is down at the table level. As usual, Mr Williamson has juggled and jacked up the figures. Can I give the actual figures for the benefit of National members?

Dr Wayne Mapp: It’s on the graph.

Hon HARRY DUYNHOVEN: Oh no, not the actual figures. They are a percentage of GDP, and members must remember that under Labour GDP has grown dramatically. Here are the dollar figures, and we must remember that Maurice Williamson was talking about Auckland.

In Auckland in 1999 there were $93.6 million worth of large State highway projects actually under construction. This year, 2007-08, the large State highway projects either under construction or planned to be under construction in Auckland will be worth more than $1.6 billion. I think that is something over 12 times as much, but certainly more than 10 times as much.

There are many other key projects that have previously been made public. They include State Highway 18 between North Shore City and Waitakere City. Greenhithe has already been completed, and Hobsonville has been started. The State Highway 1 northern busway has been completed, and ALPURT B2 is progressing. State Highway 20 between Manukau City and Waitakere City, Mount Roskill and the Manukau Harbour crossing, is progressing. All those projects are on the go—$1.6 billion worth. Let us look at a few things that Maurice talked about, and at what we have achieved in land transport.

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): The member’s full name must be used.

Hon HARRY DUYNHOVEN: Mr Maurice Williamson talked fondly about all the wonderful things done in his era. In the period when he was the Minister—I think he was the longest serving transport Minister in New Zealand; he has been around for about three decades—what did we see? We saw roading infrastructure run down—and rail infrastructure sold off and absolutely asset-stripped, and coastal shipping demolished—and we did not see a huge change in the road toll. We saw it tracking down but not making anything like the progress we needed to make to get to a real world environment such as we would expect in a modern developed country. But we have had tremendous success in that. We have had success not only with the road toll—which last year was the lowest for 46 years—but also in aviation and in the maritime world, and in recreational boating, and so on.

We have made a huge difference in reducing carnage, death, and suffering on the road, in the air, and on our waters. In addition, we have put a huge investment into transport—not only into roads, I tell Mr Williamson, but also into public transport. Investment through Vote Transport has increased from $1.06 billion in the 1999-2000 year to $2.53 billion in the 2007-2008 year. That is an increase of 117 percent.

Expenditure on transport and other votes, including Auckland rail and the national rail network, is also shown in Vote Finance. There is a $231 million provision to guarantee revenue levels for the National Land Transport Plan, as announced in the 2006 Budget. Investment in passenger transport, through the National Land Transport Plan, has increased from $42 million—just $42 million in 1999-2000—to $263 million. Members should think on those figures and what they mean for public passenger transport. This year, there is roughly, in round figures, a 500 percent increase.

In all sorts of areas we have had to invest because of the neglect of the National Government in its term in office. Investment in State highway maintenance and construction has increased from $563 million in 1999-2000 to $1.09 billion this year, which is roughly an 83 percent increase. We can look at all those things and say, yes, we can bandy figures around, but what does that mean? I actually get complaints from people about the amount of road construction going on. In fact, they say that their cars are always dirty. I never heard that in the entire period of the National Government. Indeed, the complaints were exactly the opposite—nothing was being done. If we look further and ask what the benefit of this is, we see that we are getting people out of their cars and into public transport, which is reducing congestion in our main cities.

In addition, we are not only getting some of those back maintenance and neglected infrastructure issues solved but we are actually looking at structures for the future. We are looking at our development for the future and our infrastructure for the years ahead—we are planning ahead. For the first time we have had 10-year plans, and that has caused us some grief because sometimes communities get very upset to find that their pet project is actually coming at the end of a 10-year plan. We have dramatically increased the amount of funding in order to make those 10-year plans function, so that we can get some surety for people.

Mr Williamson talked in National’s advertising campaign about the fact that roading monies were not all used for roading. The wear and tear on roads was supposed to be paid for by road-user charges, relicensing fees, and other charges, such as petrol excise duties, and so on, but Mr Williamson’s complaint at the last election was that that money was not all going into roading. I can tell Mr Williamson that we spend $300 million more, approximately, per year, right now, than what we get from all the transport inputs into roading costs on our land transport infrastructure.

Hon Ruth Dyson: Say that again.

Hon HARRY DUYNHOVEN: We spend $300 million more than the total amount we get from road-user charges, excise duties, and relicensing fees, etc. We actually budget $300 million per year more than that to go into land transport—into passenger transport and roading. So Mr Williamson is crying crocodile tears, and far from being the saviour, he is the guy who damn near wrecked it. He is the guy who proposed selling the roading network, and there are certain things—

Dr Wayne Mapp: That’s not true and you know it’s not true.

Hon HARRY DUYNHOVEN: Oh, not true? It is still going on, and if the ladies and gentlemen of this Committee believe that National will not do it again, I tell them they should think again. National will do precisely what it did in 1990. I was the one who sprang John Banks’ speech on the Christmas package that the National Party was going to do. We ran an advertising campaign accordingly in that election campaign, which we had to take off air. We had to take it off air because there was no proof. We were too modest in our view of what the National Party’s destruction would be, and we are now paying the price. We have a railway network, for example, in this country that is totally asset-stripped, and we are having to spend millions and millions—in fact, hundreds of millions of dollars—to rebuild it and to try to ensure that it is a reliable and safe railway network. [Interruption] Sorry?

Hon Tau Henare: Who awarded the knighthood to Sir Michael Fay?

Hon HARRY DUYNHOVEN: I am not interested in Sir Michael Fay. I am interested in the dumb decision, which, at the time, I said was a dumb decision, by the National Party to sell the main transport infrastructure in New Zealand—the outfit that hauled over 50 percent of the line-haul bulk freight. That was National’s sale of railways in 1992-93.

We cannot ensure that this country has a viable transport system without spending money. We are doing that, and instead of hearing crocodile tears tonight from National’s transport spokesperson—at least, I think he is National’s transport spokesperson but it has been a bit hard to tell recently—we should have had some praise for what we have done. So I tell the ladies and gentlemen in this Chamber, and the many whom I am sure are listening to the radio, that we have seen a tremendous increase in what this country has committed to its future transport needs. I am absolutely proud of that, and I am proud to have had a small part to play in making it happen.

• Vote agreed to.

Dr PITA SHARPLES (Co-Leader—Māori Party) : Kia ora, tēnā koe; tēnātātou katoa. I doubt that there would be many people in Kaeō this week who see the value of paying out $2 million to consultants to sort out the right venue for the Rugby World Cup stadium, let alone paying out $4.6 million for the inflatable rugby ball in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. I am pretty sure that the Ōākura community would be more interested in the prosperity of their community in the southern hemisphere than in a 3-year loan to a modelling company in the United States—in the right hemisphere.

The Māori Party comes to Vote Economic, Industry and Regional Development acutely aware of the cost of the weather losses this nation has suffered in the last fortnight. Globally, the cost of insured weather-related catastrophes amounted to almost $92 billion in 2005. The cost of the overall economic loss was as high as $210 billion. Typically, the total economic losses are three times larger than the insurance costs. So when we come to the issue of sustainable economic development, we cannot overlook the impacts of climate change, and of how we manage it and operate and adapt for it.

The Māori Party has long advocated the call for a genuine progress index that takes into account both sides of the ledger—the negatives, such as crime, pollution, family breakdown, and stress, along with the positives. The overwhelming community spirit that has embraced the nation over these last few weeks has to be seen as a massive investment in the long-term quality of life, although the scores of houses rendered inhabitable place a huge toll on us all.

Although through our GDP we may boast that there has been an increase in jobs, it fails ever to reflect the real state of living standards. It will not reflect the reality of some 12.7 percent of New Zealand’s families, or about 266,700 families, who could not keep up with power, gas, or water payments over the course of the previous year. That is a lot of people to be struggling over their payments.

Although the Government may tell us that the rate of unemployment has dropped, it does not give us the details of these families’ lives and the challenge they have simply in putting bread on the table. So we will not learn from the GDP figure that the biggest cause of financial difficulty causing problems for some 30.5 percent of Māori families is the pressure put on them simply by medical and dental bills. This is the real cost of progress.

We in the Māori Party believe that the Crown has fallen far short of fulfilling the guarantees of article 3 of the Treaty of Waitangi. When the Minister of Finance talks in glowing terms of promoting a savings culture, does he recognise that Māori are far more likely to have no savings at all—23.9 percent of Māori are in this position, compared with 14.4 percent of European—or that Māori are more likely to have bought something on hire purchase in the past year? These indicators are all part of a picture of kaupapa-based economic development that takes into account the collective interests of all people.

So when we read the select committee comments from the Minister—noting a traditional reluctance to take market leadership in New Zealand—we cannot but think: “What about the incredible reputation Māori have earned in the global entrepreneurship stakes?”. Māori were placed third in the 30 OECD countries for their entrepreneurship in establishing new businesses. We know that the issue for Māori is not in the start up of new businesses but in the sustainability of those businesses, yet the funding allocated fails to recognise this.

For example, we would know that the fact that the prison population has increased by 23 percent in the 6 years to 2005 to a massive 7,496 inmates does not represent value for money. We would suggest that the genuine progress index cannot be measured in the numbers of prisons built or in the astronomically high rates of offending, conviction, and incarceration, particularly of Māori. We would also suggest that genuine progress might be better reflected in ensuring the ecological footprint that we leave behind is not soiled by the costs of stripping the ozone layer bare, or of air, water, and household pollution.

• Vote agreed to.

Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (National—Northcote) : One of the most disturbing media images we saw over the period of the adjournment was a photograph of a dishevelled elderly man pleading with the Prime Minister and tugging at her hem—a man dressed, perhaps somewhat inappropriately, in a leather jacket. I looked closely at this picture and thought that the man was perhaps a member of the New Zealand public who was pleading for access to the health care he had been denied under this Government. When I looked a little more closely, I saw that this person was the Minister of Health pleading for his job. There is no doubt that under this Minister health has turned into a disaster zone for the Labour Government. It was in a safe pair of hands under Annette King, but things have gone from bad to worse since Minister Hodgson has taken over.

I look forward to the Minister getting up and taking a call today, because I want him to explain how the extra $1.5 billion that the Government’s Budget is to put into health will be spent. When I talk to people in my Northcote electorate—people on the North Shore—they tell me that when they go to North Shore Hospital they find that things are absolutely no better than they were 8 years ago when Labour came to power. So the Minister really has to get up and explain to us why spending on health has doubled from $6 billion to almost $12 billion a year, but when people go to an accident and emergency department in New Zealand now they are in a situation that is actually worse than the one they were in 8 years ago.

I have been looking at the situation at North Shore Hospital with my colleague Wayne Mapp, the MP for North Shore, because we could no longer ignore what is happening in the accident and emergency department there. Elderly people are having to spend up to 26 hours sitting on trolleys in the accident and emergency department, unable to get a bed in a hospital ward. The Minister will not dispute—in fact, I think he would be foolish to do so—that the conditions in the accident and emergency waiting area in that hospital are not up to scratch. Patients are sitting there without being able to get hold of adequate pain care. The doctors and nurses are not to blame; they are working in very, very trying conditions. But I say to the Minister that the basic thing is that although this Government has doubled spending on health, conditions are not getting any better in our hospitals. People are not getting more elective surgery, and things have not improved. I am sure that if the Minister gets up he will go on about cheaper doctors’ visits, but I want him to tell us how hospital care has actually improved for the people of New Zealand.

I would like to get him up so he can tell us how things are improving in the area of mental health. We are now spending $1 billion a year on mental health, which is an increase of 66 percent since this Government came to office, yet the Ministry of Health in its annual report tells us that young people, Māori, older people, and Pacific Island people are not getting access to the mental health care services they need. I think that is a real indictment, because the theme that runs through health care under this Government is that although more and more is being spent on health, the results are not improving. The Minister cannot tell us that things are any better than when he got the job. In fact, they are considerably worse.

Another case that has got quite a bit of publicity over the past few months—and I know that the Minister cares deeply about social justice—is the 87 second-round claimants in the Lake Alice Hospital case who each had $35,000 lopped off their compensation payments. It is quite disgusting, but that was actually done as a secret deal around the Cabinet table. When we asked the Minister about this in the Health Committee, he actually said that it was nothing to do with Vote Health. Since then he has come back and said that indeed it is to do with Vote Health. Cabinet has been talking about this for quite some time, and we want that money to be paid out. I know that the Minister, for all his faults and for all his mismanagement of health, is a man of integrity. I know he will want to see that money rightfully paid to those people who suffered in Government institutions for many years. I tell him that there are 87 of them and that it will cost him only $3 million. You have spent an extra $1.5 billion in the last Budget, and I think you should be paying out those people now—

The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson): By using the word “you”, the member is bringing the Chair into the debate.

Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: I am sorry. It is Minister Hodgson I am referring to.

So that is an issue that needs to be considered. But the Minister will have a lot else on his mind, because conflicts of interest are rife in the health system run by him. We have had the case of what is going on in the Hawke’s Bay District Health Board at the moment. We can have no confidence that that will be settled properly. I tell the Minister that it is time for him to come clean on these issues.

Dr JACKIE BLUE (National) : I am pleased that the Minister is here tonight, and I hope he does take a call. I want to talk about Herceptin. It was mentioned in the Budget that money has been allocated for an international trial. I asked the Minister questions prior to our meeting in the Health Committee, and I asked additional questions on the day, and quite frankly, I was really concerned and perturbed by the answers.

My first concern—I have a number of them—is the proposed trail, for which $5 million has been allocated. I might add here that whenever the international trial is mentioned by the Minister, he always qualifies it with an adjective such as “possible”, “proposed”, or “potential”. There is no date and there is no certainty. It is floated as something in the future. There is no guarantee that this trial will get off the ground, and, indeed, if it does get off the ground, whether sufficient numbers of women will be recruited into it so that the results will be statistically significant.

So we have a situation whereby from 1 July women have been eligible for the 9-week regime. Let us look at this 9-week regime that is now on offer. It is based on a very small trial in Finland—the FinHer trial. Only 250 women participated, and of those 250 only 52 had the 9-week regime that is now on offer in New Zealand. Because the numbers were so small, the results were not statistically significant. Even the Minister admits this. He told the Health Committee that the FinHer study was underpowered—which means there were not enough women—and that there were quite large “error bars”. When there are large error bars it means that there is uncertainty around the results. I ask the Minister why, when he believes the 9-week Herceptin results are so uncertain, he is now offering the 9-week regime to New Zealand women. Perhaps the Minister will take a call to explain that. What does it say about this Government and what it thinks about New Zealand women? But that is not all—there are more concerns.

I asked the Minister what reports he has received from oncology groups about the 9-week combination regime, and I asked what that advice was. I was provided with a summary of the advice and I looked really, really hard, but I could not find any comments supporting a 9-week treatment. Here are some of the comments: “9-week data is too weak”; “9 weeks is speculative”; “a 9-week proposal is out of line with best-quality evidence provided”; “the weight of evidence supports 12 months”; and “data from FinHer is not weighty evidence on which to base serious funding decisions”. What have we got? We have a 9-week trial, have we not? Yet that is what our New Zealand oncologists told our Minister, the very same Minister who had told Parliament a few months before that he would take on the views of the oncology community. And what has he done? He has done the exact opposite. What does this say about our Minister of Health?

Without a clinical trial that can recruit sufficient numbers it may be years and years before we know whether the 9-week regime is a dud. From 1 July women are basically flying blind. They are not part of a clinical trial. No data is being collected. They are not being monitored as if they were in a clinical trial. There is no analysis of whether the 9 weeks is effective. The only data that is being collected is the very basic data of the Cancer Registry, which collects only registrations and deaths. It does not record what happens in between. There is no record if a woman develops a relapse. What is more, our data is hopelessly out of date. The latest data is confirmed to be from 2002—that is, over 5 years ago. It is far too out of date.

For the sake of argument, let us say that the trial does get off the ground. Women will have no option but to enter it, because that is the only way they will get a fifty-fifty chance to get the international standard of care, which is 12 months. It will be a roll of a dice, will it not? Will Lady Luck look after these women? I have spoken to two women who have actually started the 9-week regime. They have both told me that once they have completed it they will self-fund to complete 12 months of Herceptin. It is my prediction that that is what will happen if we get this trial up and running. Some of the unlucky ones who get the 9-week trial will find the money to self-fund to complete a 12-month course. What will that do? It will contaminate the results. It will make an absolute joke of the trial.

What has happened is a total and absolute cop-out by this Government. Women are being dished up an unproven 9-week Herceptin regime. Out of 23 OECD countries we are the only country that has made this decision. We have to point to Pharmac and its decision-making process. I applaud those eight courageous women who have lodged a judicial review over the decision for a 9-week regime. Let the truth be revealed.

BARBARA STEWART (NZ First) : It is a pleasure to take a call on behalf of New Zealand First in this debate. We know that this Health vote is extremely important. It does affect the well-being of many New Zealanders and, of course, the output has far-reaching effects. There are consequences for us all. This is an area that is far too important to play politics with; the well-being of New Zealanders is at stake.

Again this year there has been significant investment in the health system, which we applaud. It is excellent, and we must congratulate the Minister. We are very aware that there are still challenges ahead. In New Zealand First, we were delighted with the significant investment in the health of older people—$405.2 million over 4 years. That is a large amount. The largest amount, $150 million, will go towards boosting wages in the aged-care residential sector. This is an investment that is much needed in the aged-care sector.

We know that wages needed to be boosted in the home-based support area and in the residential care sector. We have had petitions for many, many years about this very aspect. It is a sad state of affairs that wages have been so low for so long. How much have we valued the contribution these workers have made? How much have we valued the elderly? It really makes one ask these questions. Fortunately, the situation can now be changed for the better, but the challenge will be to ensure that a significant amount of the funding is actually reflected in the pay packets of the workers.

Inadequate staffing ratios in the residential care industry can definitely affect the care that is provided to older people, and at this stage of their lives this factor is totally out of their control or the control of their family. It should not be an issue. It is essential that the workforce numbers remain stable and that there is the potential to grow and expand the number of people employed in this area. We have an ageing population and our dependence on this sector will only increase, so it is imperative that there is a continued focus in this area.

New Zealand First, with the Minister, has ensured not only that there is substantially more money for the aged care sector but that many of the structural problems plaguing the sector are addressed. We know that industry providers should pay fair wages and provide quality care. Of course, part of that is providing some form of training. We know that successful completion of training courses helps to ensure that there is some consistency in the care of our elderly, and we look forward to seeing that. We know that the money allocated last year did not have a tangible result for workers and we do not want to see a repeat of the situation this year.

We are also looking forward to developments in the oral health field. A significant amount of money has been made available over the last few years to develop an oral health service that may better meet the needs of the various districts throughout New Zealand and to ensure that there are adequate dental therapists available to carry out the work in hygienic, safe conditions. We are aware too that the rate of dental decay is on the increase in both children and young people. We know that poor oral health reflects negatively on anybody’s health, particularly that of a child.

Although we are very impressed with the amount of consultation that is currently being carried out with various stakeholders about the shape and the provision of the dental service—and I know that the district health boards are working hard to finalise their proposals for the available funds and that some have already submitted their plans—we are also very aware that additional funds will be essential if all of the projects are to be completed. There is little point in carrying out the consultation if there is insufficient money to meet the plans that are being put together at great cost. Although we realise that the training of dental therapists has been an essential priority for the Labour Government, we are looking forward now to seeing the results of the consultation and an improvement in all the oral health indicators. We are looking forward to monitoring progress in this area.

It is also important to ensure that there are adequate dentists available to provide care for high school students. We are aware that many dentists will no longer provide care for high school students and this shortfall must be corrected if we are to have a First World service. Staffing is also an issue that must be addressed over the next year.

HEATHER ROY (Deputy Leader—ACT) : It is a great pleasure to stand tonight on behalf of the ACT party to talk of health issues. Unfortunately, my slot does not allow me to touch on even a fraction of the real issues that exist in the health sector, but I do want to talk about the upcoming elections of district health boards in conjunction with the local body elections in October this year. District health boards, of course, came into being in about 2001 and were set up with quite impressive cost. They continue to cost this country around $25 million a year once all the contributing factors come into account.

Despite the set-up of district health boards and an extra $4.5 billion a year being spent on health, in actual fact we are seeing no extra health services—nothing extra contributed to patients requiring health care in this country. In fact, when we take into account population growth we have failed not even to tread water but have moved backwards in terms of outcomes in the health sector.

The district health boards, as governance boards, do need to shoulder some of the responsibility, although I should point out that in many respects they are just the meat in the sandwich. In fact, a pertinent point I would like to make is that a cynic might well be tempted to say that district health boards were put in place to put in an extra layer of bureaucracy to separate the Minister of Health and the patient at the bottom of the queue. It is very important that when we have governance boards that take a significant share of the health funding—funding that could be spent, for example, on people requiring hip operations or knee operations, or on children requiring grommets—they do take money out of the equation.

We need to take into account just what happens with these elections. People put forward their names, in good faith, to stand for district health boards, thinking that they are there to represent the needs of their local populations. People vote for these people, who are often pillars of the community and who are well known. The people who do cast their votes, sadly not enough of them, do so thinking that these people will represent their local needs. That, sadly, is not the case. At the first meetings of the district health boards those members—those people who think that they are, in fact, going to contribute to the health needs of their local populations—are told that they are there to implement the health policy of the Minister of Health and the Government of the day. So they are there under a misapprehension, having participated in a completely phoney election, and I question whether this process should continue at all.

These governance boards are, in fact, phoney democratically elected boards. I would contend that they really have no place in our process. Many board members, being very frustrated when they realise what their actual function is, have tried to speak out and have been stymied. They have been silenced by their chairs and by people further up the chain, and that is very regrettable.

Each board contains seven elected members and four appointees. In many cases, although the people who put their names forward and who are elected are well meaning, frequently a combined board often does not have all the collective skills necessary to fulfil all the roles expected of it by the Minister and the Ministry of Health. When that happens the appointees are chosen to fill those gaps. But all too often, as we have seen of late, those people are chosen more for their political affiliation and the favours that they have bestowed upon the Government of the day than they are for the necessary skills that a good governance board brings forward. That again is quite regrettable.

We have seen any number of examples—not just the most recent example in the Hawke’s Bay that was spoken about in the House today, but also a number of other examples—where people have been found to have had quite terrible conflicts of interest and have used those quite inappropriately, not to further the needs of their local populations but too often sadly to meet their own needs and feather their own nests. One does have to ask whether the function fulfilled by these governance boards—the elected district health boards—would not be just as well fulfilled by a small and very good well-functioning team.

JO GOODHEW (National—Aoraki) : Like my colleague Jonathan Coleman I, too, saw that photograph of the Prime Minister with the Minister of Health but I read it slightly differently. The way the Minister of Health was holding on to the Prime Minister’s arm I thought reflected perhaps him asking to be let out of the health portfolio—“let me out now.”

I rise to speak in this appropriation debate about the aged-care sector, and I do so because it is truly in disarray. Not only are there the workforce crises that we have been hearing about—crises that involve not only low pay but also poor training opportunities—but also there is a lack of discharge planning in the aged-care sector. “Discharge planning” now sees elderly people who have broken hips being sent back to a rest home without a walking frame, and elderly people being sent home from hospitals in taxis and when they ask how they will unlock the door and turn on the heater, they are told to get the taxi driver to do it. People are sent home too late in the day to access a pharmacy to get prescriptions so they go without their medications, and elderly people are in the hallways of hospitals for days on end waiting because they cannot get admitted—elderly people who are frail and those same people are very much disadvantaged in our health system.

The compliance costs in the aged-care sector are very high, with duplication of auditing, and inconsistencies as well. Then there is the latest debacle. It is indicative of the chaos and the conflict within the health-care sector. It is a sector that is beset by strikes, by negotiation breakdowns, by management and health professional distrust and mistrust, and now we have the judicial reviews. There is a line-up of judicial reviews: we have a judicial review for breast cancer patients, a judicial review regarding pathology contracts, and judicial reviews in the aged-care sector now, and then also threatened in the pharmacy contracts.

Let us just touch on why there would be a judicial review, and I might add it is not an option that would be lightly taken because it is an expensive option. It is truly one that is taken when it is thought there is nowhere else to go. So what has driven the aged-care providers to go down this track? I tell members that it is simply more distrust, more mistrust, and their negotiation process has certainly not served them well. Those providers have said they will pass on all—and I do not understand what the Minister does not understand about the word “all”—of the funding for wage increases.

Hon Pete Hodgson: Ha, ha!

JO GOODHEW: The Minister laughs, and that is exactly the sort of response I would expect from him. I tell the Minister that that is the response that gets the aged-care providers so angry and hacked off. They are the people who are trying to run businesses and when they promise you, and when they guarantee that they will pass on all of the funding, you laugh like that and you wonder why there is distrust.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): Order!

JO GOODHEW: My apologies. So the aged-care providers have said they will pass on all the funding, but they have been told that to do that they must promote a collective agreement, not just offer collective and individual employment agreements, but they have to promote collective agreements. They think that is beyond the law. They think that is asking too much, and that is one of the reasons they are seeking a judicial review.

They also want people to understand the realities. Last year caregiver wages rose on average 4.7 percent and nurse wages by 6.7 percent. That was in line with a 3 percent inflation agreement increase given to rest homes, and a 5.9 percent increase given to geriatric hospitals. There is so much distrust, even though they have been passing on this money, that they have gone to a judicial review. They believe the district health boards are acting outside the scope of the Employment Relations Act and therefore they have sought a judicial review.

Now the union has waded in. It says that providers do not seem to think they have a responsibility to pay workers a decent wage. The money, $35 million, will all go to those caregivers’ wages; that has been guaranteed by the sector. What do the Minister and the district health boards not understand about “all”? Business New Zealand chief executive, Phil O’Reilly, has also had this to say about it. He said the district health boards appear to be attempting to impose obligations on aged-care employers that go beyond what other employers are required to meet under the law. This is most certainly yet another example of the distrust—the mistrust—within the health sector.

Hon PETE HODGSON (Minister of Health) : At the change of Government there were 89,000 New Zealanders on a waiting list who, back then, did not know what they would get from the health system or when they would get it. They did not know. They lay there, stayed there, and waited anonymously for the phone that did not ring and for the mail that did not come. There were 89,000 of them. I know a man who waited for hip surgery for 12 years. Under this Government we decided to place a little bit of priority on to elective surgical services and the result is as follows: there are more New Zealanders getting elective surgical services now in the New Zealand public health system than ever, and, what is more, they get it on the basis of―[Interruption] They do not like it, do they, Mr Chairperson. It is a barrage of rabble-rousing. I sat in silence while I listened to the drivel that came from the Opposition benches; I am giving them a bit of a towelling and they cannot take it.

What we have now in the public health system is people receiving elective surgical services on one criterion only, and that criterion is need. It is not based on who one knows, on how long one has been waiting, or on where one lives; it is based on need. What is more, nearly every New Zealander who is accepted for surgical services in this country receives that service reliably within 6 months.

Hon Members: Oh!

Hon PETE HODGSON: Oh, members opposite have decided that that cannot be true. Well, I have bad news for them. Nearly every New Zealander who is accepted for elective surgical services today will receive that surgery within 6 months. And, what is more, the information to prove that is on websites and it is available to any member of the public. Clearly, National Party politicians feel quite OK about picking up their salaries without doing any work. They could have found that out for themselves. That is the fact of the matter, and, what is more, the average wait time is not 6 months but closer to 3 months. Let us compare that with 89,000 people on a waiting list who did not know when they were going to get anything from the health system.

Or we could just change topics. Let us go to primary health care. Let us remind ourselves that at the time of the change of Government, doctors’ fees were not only high, they were rising. Do we know why? Yes, we know why. It is because the general medical subsidy had been wallowing. It was not being increased by the National Government. The National Government was starving the primary health care sector, which is why, roughly, the income of a doctor has increased by about 100 percent in the last 8 years, which is not bad. It is not bad if one thinks that primary health care is at the heart of a good health system and that one would then set out to value that primary health care delivery, and we have. But New Zealanders, as a whole, have seen a reduction in the cost of their general practitioner visits, which is why more New Zealanders than ever before are now going to see their general practitioner. The pharmaceutical costs have come down—wait for it—from $15 per item to $3 per item. That is quite a big decrease, yet we have had members of this House getting up and saying, time and time again, that they did not know where the money was going. Well, there are a couple of things to think about. One is more elective surgical services on time than ever before. The other is cheap doctors’ fees.

I will tell members what else happened with general practitioners in the 1990s. I do not think many people know this, but after medical students graduate and do a couple of years in a hospital—they are up to their eighth year by then—those who want to become general practitioners then enter into a 3-year course. But, you see, National halved the number of training places. Let me repeat that. National slashed by half the number of training places for New Zealand’s general practitioners in about 1994 or 1995. It did it in two bits. It halved the number of training places so, guess what, general practitioners did not go into the training places. That is what happened. What has happened since is that Annette King has lifted the number of training places once; I have lifted the number of training places twice. There will now be more general practitioners in training, from January next year, than ever before. That is the difference between one party and another, and that is where some of the money has gone.

Let us pick up another example. I would like to thank Barbara Stewart from New Zealand First for her contribution, which ranged across a number of topics, but she certainly alighted on oral health. Let us quickly tell the story again. There was a time when dental nurses were trained in New Zealand. Then when they became dental therapists—they had a name change—there was a time when we stopped training them. We did not slow down the training. We did not halve the training. It got stopped. It is almost unbelievable that we would stop training an entire profession in this country, but we did. National did that. National did that, and it is reflected in measurable increases in diseased, missing, or filled teeth amongst our 6-year-old to 12-year-old kids. It is measurable, and it is an outrage. Annette King, herself a dental therapist, got a school started soon after the change of Government, and a few years later out came the graduates. She got another school started, and a few years later out came the graduates. That is where New Zealand First picked up on this debate and said: “Thank you for paying attention to oral health.” Barbara Stewart said: “The money has come out. You’ll need to give more.” I agree with her, but she forgot to tell the story that the original sin was that a silly Government stopped training an entire profession. It is almost beyond belief. That is the difference between National and Labour.

We could go to any number of things. If we look at vaccination rates, we see that in 1992 the vaccination rate for 2-year-olds in New Zealand was 60 percent. Today it is 84 percent; the goal is 95 percent. You see, we are getting better. We are not good enough, but we are getting better. The question is: how did it ever get so low? How could we have ever dropped our vaccination rate? It is one of the most cost-effective things one can do in a health system; how could we let it get down to a level as low as that? The National members are now silent. They are silent in shame.

We could go to buildings.

Hon Tau Henare: Have you been vaccinated for rabies?

Hon PETE HODGSON: This Government has built buildings from Kaitāia, where that loud-mouth comes from, to Invercargill, and places in between. It has built small, little hospitals; for example, in Clyde, where I passed through the other day. In Wellington, just down the road from here, there is an example of a very big project. We have projects going now in Wanganui, Blenheim, Tauranga, and Kaitāia. We have no shortage of ambition to build good facilities for our health care workers to work in.

Talking about health care workers, I point out that in the 1990s there was no planning. Not only did the National Government decide not to train any dental therapists at all, not only did it decide to halve the number of general practitioner places, and not only did it decide on one evening to slash the funding to the only dental school in this country by 38 percent, which is unbelievable, but also it did no workforce planning. That is why we ran out of radiation therapists. That is why we have difficulties with this speciality or that speciality. There was no training. You see, we cannot proceed if we do not train. For example, if this country decides to move to colorectal screening, we will have to have colonoscopists. We have to have the money, the workforce, and the idea coincident. If we do not, it will not work, and under National it did not. Under this Government, not only have Annette King and Steve Maharey, when he was Minister for Tertiary Education, increased the number of doctors in training in New Zealand, but we have 1,400 more doctors working in our system now than at the change of Government. There are either 3,000 or 4,000—I am embarrassed to say that I have forgotten—more nurses in the system since the change of Government. That is what happens when we pay attention to workforce planning.

The other difference between National and Labour is that there is policy on one side of the House, and on the other side of the House there is no policy. On this side of the Chamber we came into Government knowing that we were going to establish district health boards, knowing that we were going to establish primary health organisations, knowing that we were going to have an updated New Zealand Health Strategy, knowing that we were going to have New Zealand’s first-ever Disability Strategy, and knowing that we were going to pay attention to disparities in a variety of ways, including through the Māori Health Strategy. We knew that we were going to pay attention to public health in a variety of ways, such as the Tobacco Strategy and the Healthy Eating - Healthy Action strategy. We are not short of ideas. We knew that we needed to improve cancer control. We have the Cancer Control Strategy, and on it goes.

But 8 years after National was thrown into Opposition, it has no policy. It has a five-point plan with four points on it, and no policy. It has a discussion document that was due out in April that will now come out in September. That is 8 years after the change of Government. What has happened to it? The policy, when it comes out, will be underwhelming. It will be underwhelming because we know that our New Zealand health system, though never good enough, is better than it has ever been.

There is another difference between National and Labour. My Government is really happy about transparency. The previous Government was very happy with opacity. You see, the booking system is on the web. It is available so that one can tell what is going on. There was no reporting of elective surgery under National. There were no standards to aspire to, for example, in ambulance services. There were no standards to aspire to in emergency department responses. The National Party gets up every 3 months and says that the emergency department responses are not good enough. We already know. We set the standards, and we want district health boards to progress towards those standards. Under National there were no such standards and no such measurements. We do not have any shortage of transparency, and we are not at all averse to the idea of having the light shine on our health system.

Mr Coleman made a few remarks after his ad hominem attack. He always seems to want to start in the gutter and work his way up from there. His remarks on mental health do need a response. He said that the mental health services in New Zealand, though he acknowledged they were better, were not good enough. I agree with him, because we are still putting in place a mental health blueprint that began under his Government.

Hon Tau Henare: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. Can I just get some direction from you about the third call in a row from the Minister. Appendix A of the Standing Orders, in respect of time limits for speeches in the Committee of the whole House, states: “Multiple speeches of 5 minutes each, but normally not more than 2 consecutive speeches”. I am not trying to put the Minister off; I am just interested. I have never heard three in a row.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Clem Simich): Thank you for raising that, Mr Henare. I gave the Minister three calls. It is quite normal for a Minister to have three, four, or five calls.

Hon PETE HODGSON: I just say to the member that I have a point of agreement with him that we are not yet finished with improving mental health in this country, and I could go on about the areas that need particular improvement.

He then raised the issue of the Zentveld case. He raised that in the Chamber, as he raised it in the select committee, and I do apologise that I misled the member in the select committee. It was a genuine error on my part. Yes, the costs do come out of the health budget; they just happen not to come out of the mental health budget. I can assure the member that the Zentveld case will make its progress through to the people affected.

Then we had Dr Blue, who has basically spent her short parliamentary career so far painting herself as a friend of the drug companies and an enemy of Pharmac. Let me just say one or two things about Pharmac and one or two things to Jacqui Blue.

Hon Members: More personal attacks!

Hon PETE HODGSON: Again, you see, they do not like it. Again there is this big barrage. They are trying to shout the facts down. The facts are that Pharmac was begun under National as a result of 1993 legislation. Pharmac is a cost-effective purchaser of drugs for the New Zealand health system. That is where some of our value for money comes from, and that is why people keep travelling to New Zealand to see how Pharmac works—it is regarded as a most cost-effective way of purchasing drugs. The member went on about Herceptin. I do not have time to engage on that—I can assure the member that I would be happy to do so at some other time—but I do want to reflect again on the remarks made by Barbara Stewart.

Hon Tau Henare: When are you going to pay the Lake Alice money?

Hon PETE HODGSON: I have actually answered that. If the member would keep his big mouth shut, listen for just a little bit, and try not to talk me down even as I answer his last question, he would know that I answered it already.

Dr Jonathan Coleman: When will you pay the money?

Hon PETE HODGSON: Presently.

Hon Tau Henare: You just said you already did.

Hon PETE HODGSON: Well, can I just—

Dr Jonathan Coleman: I’m getting rung up by these people every day, and they say: “When the heck”—

Hon PETE HODGSON: Could the member just draw breath for 2 seconds? I would be happy to talk privately with the member and give him whatever information he wants. I am not worried about speaking publicly, but I am trying to get on with this speech and get it closed.

I thank Barbara Stewart very much for her remarks on the health of older people. Is it not interesting how difficult it is to improve the pay of low-paid New Zealanders? Is it not difficult when we have the money, we offer it up, and we say to the folk that they have to pass it through to the workers, and they say they are taking us to court, as well? Is that not interesting, and do we not now start to learn some lessons about where the real power structures sometimes occur in health? I thought that her remarks on the health of older people on low pay were wonderful.

I thought Heather Roy made an absolute mess of her speech, when she managed to speak disrespectfully, frankly, of 147 people who are elected to district health boards every 3 years. She said they were there as Government plants. Well, that will not go very well with them. Those people are elected by the public on a local ticket, and I wish every one of them well who stands again in this forthcoming election. I distance myself seriously from those remarks that it is somehow a phoney election. I do note that she wants to get rid of elected health boards, so that, apparently, is ACT policy—no more democracy in the health system; let us remember that when it comes up to our elections. But in the meantime I just say to her that if she has any conflicts of interest that she wants to talk to me about, I am always open to hear about it.

MARYAN STREET (Labour) : I rise to take just a brief call on this issue today. If one were to listen only to the National Party, one would think New Zealand had a health system that would be more appropriately found in a Third World country, and that is absolutely not the case. We have a First World health system of which we can be proud. If the National Party had the wit to engage with the complexity of the health portfolio, then perhaps it could come up with some suggestions and some policy, which is currently so lacking and of which National is so bereft.

The Labour Government has ploughed money into the health system, and we have seen results from that. We have seen results such as an improvement in the numbers of elective surgery procedures that are being done around the country. In fact, just recently the Counties Manukau District Health Board was reported as having done so well in mopping up its waiting lists for elective surgeries that it was turning to surgical procedures that had not been done for a long time in the public sector. Those are procedures like those dealing with hernias, with varicose veins. There is now time, money, and capacity to attend to those minor elective surgery matters in the Counties Manukau District Health Board catchment area.

I want to talk about what we are planning as a Government going forward that these estimates in the health portfolio represent. Another $3 billion is going in over the next few years—$750 million per year—and this includes a further expansion of the elective surgery initiative to the tune of $238 million. That kind of money going into this system makes an absolute nonsense of the kind of macabre and opportunistic shroud-waving that is the only thing the National Opposition can do to draw any attention to itself in the health portfolio. We have been doing things from beginning to end in the health portfolio, from the moment we came in.

We phased in the Primary Health Care Strategy, which is about meeting the needs of families and making visits to the doctor cheaper. We graduated the implementation of that strategy in a measured and responsible way over time, culminating with, from 1 July, the 25 to 44-year-old age group being able to see the doctor for about half of what it cost them previously. That means a lot. That means that where previously an average doctor’s bill for a family was about $800 in annual terms, it will work out now at somewhere between $300 and $400, on average. That is a very significant achievement. We have started from the beginning, with those parts of the Primary Health Care Strategy that are about delivering affordable and accessible health care to New Zealand families. We hear nothing from the National Opposition about that—we hear nothing.

We then move to the secondary sector of the health service—that is, acute environments, namely hospitals and acute services working in the community. We see in the mental health blueprint funding the pouring in of money to very good effect. That money has allowed for a doubling of the number of psychiatrists, and has allowed for the provision of more community services.

Yes, although there are always difficult situations in any part of the health sector and health service delivery, we have seen huge improvements not only in the quality of delivery but in the timeliness of delivery and in the accessibility of services to New Zealand families. That is something the Government remains very proud of.

• Vote agreed to.

Hon TAU HENARE (National) : I want to start with the Therapeutic Products and Medicines Bill. Members might—

Steve Chadwick: That’s food safety.

Hon TAU HENARE: Yes, that thing. Members might be wondering why I am going to speak about that and I will tell them why. It is because this Minister in front of us now, the Hon Parekura Horomia, in the chair, never once went out of his way to support those in the rongoāMāori industry. Never once did he make sure that the people involved with Māori medicines were protected.

Steve Chadwick: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. That is quite out of order. We are talking about estimates here and not at all talking about a bill that was before a select committee.

Simon Power: In the last vote that was considered by the Committee there was a wide-ranging discussion of health issues and other matters that did not necessarily—[Interruption] Actually, this is a point of order.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Clem Simich): Yes.

Simon Power: The discussion related to a wide-ranging series of topics and was not limited to the matters that money was allocated to in the estimates. I would suggest that is the nature of the debate we are currently in.

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Clem Simich): Thank you for that. I had the feeling it was a wide-ranging debate. It should not be, of course, because no contributor should be referring to any matters that occurred before 1 July this year, except by way of comparison or by way of example. So it gets a little tricky, but we are talking about the appropriations for 2007-08—that is, today and forward.

Hon TAU HENARE: All I can say is this: “We won, you lost, eat that!”. That is what the Deputy Prime Minister said a few years ago and I could not resist the opportunity to say: “We won, you lost, eat that!” again and again about the Minister of Māori Affairs.

What has he done? I found out there is a $23 million “investment fund”—a so-called investment fund. People may ask what this investment fund is for and what it does. All it does is go to oil a few contracts out there in Maoriland, in the New Zealand community, in the hope that people will put the good word out and say: “Come on guys, vote for the Labour Party, we need your vote.” That is the sum total of what the $23 million investment fund is. It is just a take of $23 million and there is nothing in it for any of the Māori communities out there. It is contracts galore for mates. The contracts are for mates who, or so the Minister thinks, are going to be the friends of Labour come election time.

But what about obesity rates? What about diabetic rates amongst Māori? And for 7 years—not just the last financial year, and not just for this financial year. What about all of those kids and those families out there suffering from what many people in the Western World would call diseases of poverty, diseases of sheer poverty, and we have some of the highest rates of obesity and diabetes in the Western World. The prison population is absolutely appalling. So what have we got in terms of programmes to make sure that our people do not suffer from those poor, poor statistics? I am one of the first to say “if you do the crime, you do the time”, and rightly so. But, boy, is it not shocking that nearly half the prison population is of Māori descent?

Ron Mark: Then tell them to cut it out.

Hon TAU HENARE: Absolutely, I have no problem in saying “cut it out”. I have no problem with it, and like I said—[Interruption] No, the member did not listen. He had his head down but he was not listening—[Interruption] He was not listening. I am one of the first people to say “if you do the crime, you do the time”. But let us figure out—[Interruption] Sorry?

Nandor Tanczos: Soft on crime!

Hon TAU HENARE: Yeah, right! Yeah, whatever! This is the man who goes round the back, daks up and then comes back to work again.

Nandor Tanczos: I raise a point of order, Mr Chairperson. That is an absolutely outrageous accusation. I demand that member withdraw and apologise.

Hon TAU HENARE: I withdraw and apologise.

We also have Māori teachers—or a lack of Māori teachers. The problem is the Government has put absolutely no incentive on the table to make sure there are more Māori teachers. In fact, more Māori male teachers are what is required. Te Ururoa Flavell shakes his head and says that that is not what the community wants. Well, he is a former principal, actually. It is no wonder he thinks like that; he got out and came here. In fact, I say there are far too many teachers in this House. They should be back where they belong, and that is in front of the kids.

Then we get to 20 hours free. What does the Government want to do? It wants to hook it back into the $23 million investment fund that I mentioned earlier on. It is 20 hours free, but what is in it for kōhanga? There are 500 kōhanga. What has the Minister decided to do about 20 hours free? Absolutely nothing—it is an abject joke in Māoridom. It is an abject joke because for 7 years, millions and millions of dollars has been whittled away in silly programmes that do not do anything for anybody; they are just an abject waste of time.

I have one question. All I want to know from the Minister is what the $23 million investment fund is that he calls this new project—the new project of investing in peak Māori potential. How is the $23 million being invested in Māori potential? As for 20 hours free, only three or four kōhanga out of 500 are actually partaking of that 20 hours free. The Minister looks sideways at me. Well, I ask the Minister to give us a figure. How many new Māori teachers, Māori male teachers, will there be? What are they doing about the increase in the prison population? What are we doing about obesity rates? What are we doing about diabetes? Are we supposed to think that we should leave it up to the Māori community to deal with, never mind what the Minister says? Why is it that, when Māori people are always at the coalface, they are the ones who have to fix up their own communities? It is never the ones with the purse strings and the $23 million.

Where is that money going? Whom is it being invested in, and what are the outcomes? Is there any monitoring going on of this $23 million investment fund? If there is, I have not seen it. This side of the Chamber has not seen any monitoring reports. This side of the Chamber has not seen anything in the way of reports about a $23 million investment fund—I thought it was new money. But no, it is not new money. It is just rolled-over money from last year with the name changed. The Minister ran around the country saying it was new money. He said the $23 million investment fund was a new initiative. No, it was not. It was just a change of name and a change of direction, because the Minister of Māori Affairs got in trouble last time because of his shoddy work in terms of his ministry. That is where the $23 million came from. It has now been put into an investment fund so he can continue to fund his mates, in the forlorn hope that they will vote for the Government at the next election.

PITA PARAONE (NZ First) :Tēnā koe, Mr Chairman. It is a great pleasure to follow that last speaker. It just highlights the fact that the Ministry of Māori Development is seen as the panacea, a cure-all for all things happening in Māoridom. In spite of the efforts of our Minister, I have some criticisms, and I will certainly cover those in my speech. The previous speaker spoke about diabetes being a real health issue within Māoridom. I find it very ironic that this evening a Mr Buddy Mikaere, on behalf of a diabetes organisation he is involved in, called a meeting to discuss the different things that his organisation was doing in terms of trying to face the problem of diabetes amongst Māori, and he had to cancel it. Why? Because there was a lack of interest in terms of attending that function. I have to say that we should not blame the Ministry of Māori Affairs or the Minister. We have to point the finger at ourselves. But I ought to say that I did accept the invitation, but I was advised that it had been cancelled.

I want to address the issue of funding for Māori wardens. We all know they are a fine body of men and women who are committed to looking after their communities. This year in the Budget $2.5 million was allocated to assist with Māori wardens. I have a question. The money certainly was not new money, because the Minister advised us that it was fiscally neutral. Then, where did the money come from? Which programme, was put aside, to which that original funding was allocated? Who will be responsible for this funding? Again, we in New Zealand First are certainly interested in how that funding is to be administered, because if the funding is to go to the organisation responsible for the appointment of Māori wardens, then we would have some real concerns about that.

We are also concerned as to how this funding will be distributed. Who will determine how it will be distributed? We do not want to see a step back to the old way that things used to be. We expect that, as this is a new initiative, there will be new approaches as to how that funding will be distributed. I know that a former colleague of mine—he is probably listening tonight—Mr Edwin Perry, a fine man from the Wairarapa, is involved with the Māori wardens in the Wairarapa, and, I might add, he is responsible for the initiative New Zealand First took in terms of approaching the Labour Government for funding for this initiative. He is wondering whether he and his group will be part of those Māori wardens considered for the first round of distribution. If not, then we will certainly ask why.

Again, we want to say that although we applaud the Minister for getting this funding for Māori wardens, the proof of the pudding will be as to how that funding is distributed and how it is utilised for the betterment of not only the wardens but the communities in which they operate.

The second point I want to make is that it has been almost 3 years since Hui Taumata 2005. I find it quite strange that 2 years down the track we are funding a group to the tune of $1 million to ensure that the decisions made at Hui Taumata 2005 will be carried out. It is intended that that same level of funding will be available to what is known as the Hui Taumata group to continue in their work to 2009. It is hoped that sometime in the future they will be an independent group. But I have to ask whether that should not be the responsibility of the Ministry of Māori Development. Should it be the responsibility of this particular group, to the tune of $1 million? I would think that that could be regarded as the ministry abrogating its responsibilities.

I will look at the issues that came out of Hui Taumata 2005. There is “he tangata, he tangata”: skill development and building Māori capability; “he ao tupurawa”: building an enterprise culture; “te paetawhiti”: providing high-quality strategic information; “he tiraparaoa”: creating excellence in leadership and governance; “tapui hei whakatupu”: increasing the utilisation and development of our collectively owned assets; and “mataurangaMāori”.

These are programmes and issues for which the responsibility, I believe, should lie with the ministry rather than being contracted out to a group outside the ministry and to the tune of $1 million per year. So I have asked myself what the kaupapa of this group is. How long does it have to do what the ministry or the Minister expects it to do? Why can the Ministry of Māori Development not do this? Is it beyond the capacity of the present staff and their management to carry out this role? I know that these are serious questions to ask of the Minister, given that I used to work for that ministry, and I think I spent a bit of time working for the Minister. But at the end of the day I think it is fair to ask these questions of the Minister. I ask him to take a call and explain to us just exactly what is expected of this group. Kia ora.

Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA (Minister of Māori Affairs) : E tikaakeanōi te mihi akeanō ki ngā kanohi Māoriikonei e noho akeanōi roto i te mahanatanga o te Whare nei. Ahakoa te pupuhi o te hau, te kaha o te marangaii Te Tai Tokerau, e mihi kauanai a koutou katoa. Mai rāanōi te noho hoki akeanōi te rōpūneii roto i te āhua o te kāwanatanga, e mau kaha akeanōmō te mahi ngoikore me te mahi taumahamōtātou o te iwi Māori. Kāre e rite ki te wāineineii te whai kaha akeanōtātou o te rōpūnei e mauakeanōi te korowai o te kāwanamō te pāi o tātou o te iwi Māori.

He whakaaroi roto iākumō te rekareka o tōtātou reo, e putaana te kōrero, e mōhioakeanōngātaringa mai i te motumōtērā tino tuku, e tuku akeanōngātūpuna ki a tātou.

• [An interpretation in English was given to the House.]

[It is apt once again to acknowledge the Māori faces in the warmth of this House, despite the stormy conditions in the north; my greetings to you all. Ever since this party has been in Government it has worked hard to provide for our deficiencies in Māoridom. What we of this party have done today to progress the work of government to better us as Māori cannot be compared.

I have a view about how really wonderful our language is; it is expressive, and those who hear it throughout the land know just how great a treasure it is that the ancestors handed down to us. ]

Quite certainly, with regard to the “NDO” fund—the non-departmental output expenses—and the pūtea that the member who was sitting over here raised, that member, who is now trying to re-coalition with the Māori Party, misunderstood matters. The figures are quite simple. There was $2 million for Hui Taumata, $1 million per annum for Māori radio, and $23 million for Māori Television. The $2.5 million for Māori wardens is an investment in their future, and that is what the fund has been about. It is about extrapolating and lifting the potential of our people, to ensure that we not only keep up with the modern environment but at the same time take with us the strong culture that has been left to us by our ancestors.

In relation to the Hui Taumata, I want to thank New Zealand First for its effort in supporting the Government in relation to finally looking at the Māori wardens and working through matters with them, as much as we have supported them since we have been in Government. We have made a strong stand, and have funded and supported those people. No matter where we go around the country, we see Māori wardens are always in the car-parks. When there is flooding in Tai Tokerau or rain in Hastings, as there is now, the Māori wardens will be there. I want to thank the police commissioner for joining up with the Māori ministry to ensure that there is a better future for them.

That member questioned the investment I certainly see as I travel around the country. As I have said before, that member had one golden rule when he was a Minister: on Thursday night he went home and told people he would never go out amongst the community. One thing we learn from being in Wellington is that unless we get out, we do not know what is going on. That is what that speech was about.

It is fundamental and simple logic at the moment that most Māori youngsters between the ages of 5 and 18 are totally digitalised. I am not a good subject to talk about obesity. I know that; I will admit that. But if I were a blockhead, I would admit that too. At the end of the day, obesity is something that we have to come to grips with. Some people can do that better than other people.

But let me tell members about Tau and the gaps that he developed. When we came into Government, where were Māori? They were benefit-dependent people. But that is not the case any longer, as 85 percent have come off benefits since this Government has been in office. That member should listen to the music—85 percent have come off benefits. What is wrong with that? Nothing.

I want to give that member a lesson in labour market nuances. At the end of the day, when we have a tight labour market in Rangitīkei, up north, and there are more jobs than people, we certainly have to move fast in relation to skill development. There is an acceleration in the number of Māori who are taking up trade apprenticeships, and in the number of those who are going into business for themselves, so Pākehā do not just carry on running businesses and making Māori believe they cannot do that for themselves, and so elite Māori who are on the governance boards do not forget about beneficiaries. That is what has happened in that member’s time in Government.

Certainly, I want to talk about the effort that we are putting into the language. Māori Television has become part of this country’s history. It is etched in boardrooms and it is etched in people’s sitting rooms. It has been a serious move to keep our language alive.

It is certainly difficult to get men to go and teach. Ururoa got out and did it because he is smart and he thought he could do something for his people. The National Party today turned dog on the Māori Party, after taking it down the road and promising it all sorts of things. That is what National used to do to our people. At the end of the day, it was about protection for everybody else. At the end of the day, the National members are squealing. Let us look at them as they squeal.

But we can talk about Māori people being better off than they have ever been. [Interruption] The emotive entanglement in the past and the staunch extremes are over, I say to Mr Henare—and he knows that. Our people are committed to competing in this contemporary time. I say that 84-plus percent of previously unemployed Māori have come off the unemployment benefit. The minimum wage has gone up eight times under this Government. How much did that member take it up by in his time in Government, in 9 years? The increases did not even go over a dollar. You took it up by 92c, you miserable sods! And you want to say—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Clem Simich): The member must not say “you”.

Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA: —and the National members want to say that we have not done much.

Māori are in the best position they have been in for a long time. The Treaty settlements are going well. Do those members want to talk about health? Doctors’ fees have been halved—

Hon Member: Rubbish!

Hon PAREKURA HOROMIA:—yes, they have—and prescriptions are $3. What is bad about that? It is all right for the well-off people over there on the Opposition benches. It is a shame.

Working for Families and KiwiSaver have been two of the best policies that this country has ever seen. Why? Because it was not in the Māori psyche to save. Māori could not save, because they were generally kept poverty-stricken by the sorts of people currently on the Opposition benches, who did not care about families. What is Working for Families about? It is about giving parents a hand up so that they can keep their kids in early childcare. I want to tell the member Tau Henare that 55 percent of the kōhanga reo will take up the free early childhood education at the end of the day. That means a general saving overall of $56 a week. What is wrong with that? The issue is that a lot of our parents are working. Te PuniKōkiri did go to the committee to talk about those things.

I will now turn to the immunisation programme, which has effects on all New Zealanders but especially on Māori. I can tell members that one of the biggest injections of funds, millions of dollars, has been put into immunisation in this country. Some people said that immunisation was no good. Some people said that it was no good and that they would rather focus on witchcraft, and on the tops of twigs that are picked and pickled, and are made out to be great medicine. Rongoā—that is what that member talked about. That is what the National members’ colleague was supportive of—witchcraft. That is right; he knows that—horihori.

In relation to supporting teachers in the Māori language, the Government has offered $10,000, and we cannot find them. Do members know why? It is because most Māori are working. What a great treat it is! That is why it is hard to attract such teachers, and we are proud of that—that they can clothe their kids better and that they are the enterprise deliverers.

Woe betide those who do not understand that the assets are turning up, that we are the single-biggest exporter of meat in this country, that we are the single-biggest fish owner, and that at the end of the day we are heading towards managing the forestry. What some leaders have to understand is that it has to be about the beneficiaries, and at the end of the day I can tell members that this is one of the best phases in this transition. If we have had international experience in relation to indigenous transition, then we know that this time happens. If it has good governance, governance by the people and governance by the Crown, then Māori can only go forward, not backwards, and will not be left stranded in make-believe cuckoo lands and trying to make weak coalitions, as that member opposite is.

I say that I am proud to be the Minister of Māori Affairs. The Māori people have done very well under me, dare I say it. I saw the banners that stated: “Iwi versus Kiwi”—shame on those members opposite! I would say: “Māori All Blacks versus the All Blacks”, given the way things are going, but that is what happens. That member is trying to stretch things and to make believe that nothing is happening for Māori. Māori are in a great position. They want to be teachers, as I said. In 1966 there were only 16 Māori PhDs. I had the privilege of giving out 61 this year. I tell members that there are 492 in play right now. That makes a difference for our people. Most of our people are in work. They are not on the dole and going down to the Work and Income centre.

• Vote agreed to.

SIMON POWER (National—Rangitikei) : I cannot help but comment on Parekura Horomia’s contribution. It think it is the first time I have heard a speech in this Chamber move over such a wide range of topics in such a short period of time, with each sentence beginning with the phrase “at the end of the day”. I look forward to the same latitude being allowed in the debate on justice matters as was allowed for matters relating to Māori Affairs.

We come now to Vote Justice, one of the Government’s areas of serious failure. This area—alongside its sister, or brother, portfolios of courts, corrections, and youth justice—continues to be an area that has been handled appallingly by this Government. The tricky thing about this particular portfolio, which in some ways is a helpful thing, is that the Minister responsible for the Law Commission is also the Minister of Justice, Mark Burton. He is currently the Minister in the chair, and as he is the Minister of Justice we should give him the opportunity to explain why all the serious law reform work this Government has put before the House in the last 12 months has been done by the Law Commission and not by the Ministry of Justice.

We have seen changes in the laws relating to sedition and a massive law change in the area of evidence, and the Government’s flagship policy of effective interventions—and we will come back to this—was, again, driven by the Law Commission, as was the introduction of the Sentencing Council.

Hon Lianne Dalziel: And your point is?

SIMON POWER: The Hon Lianne Dalziel asks what my point is, and it is this: what has the Ministry of Justice been doing for the last 12 months? I have a question for the Minister: when the Prime Minister needs legal advice over such matters as the unfortunate tragedy surrounding the death of young Liam Ashley, or when she decides that the parole matters around the release of Graham Burton are too legalistic, why does she go to the Law Commission for advice and not to the Ministry of Justice?

Hon Lianne Dalziel: Well, why wouldn’t she?

SIMON POWER: Because, I tell the Minister, the Law Commission is not there to provide legal advice to the Prime Minister. The Ministry of Justice is.

The interesting thing from my point of view, when it comes to law reform, is why this Government has abandoned the Ministry of Justice as its primary law reform vehicle. It has done nothing in the last 12 months. When we look at New Policy Initiatives by Appropriation on page 739 of the estimates, we see the forecast for some of the matters this ministry will be considering.

The first on the list is Effective Interventions, which is a compact parcel of policy designed to do one thing, and that is to reduce the prison population. It is not designed to prevent crime but to reduce the prison population. That is what is stated in the explanatory note of the Criminal Law Reform Bill. We know that the Ministry of Justice has become consumed with this problem, and it is a problem for the ministry because it cannot forecast the prison population in any meaningful way.

We know that in May of this year the ministry forecast that 7,800 people would be in our prisons by the end of September, at the end of May there were 8,100 people in our prisons. It cannot get simple forecasting issues right, and that is why it is so concerned about the prison population—it cannot control it. The downstream work from the deal cut with New Zealand First—over 1,000 new police and the impact on our courts, corrections, and justice systems—was not done. We asked for papers under the Official Information Act, we have seen that that work was not done.

Even if having 1,000 new police is a laudable outcome—if we get there, and if they can get over the reduced hurdles for the mental entry test and for the various other matters that have been dropped by way of criteria for joining the police, in order to meet the target—we still do not know what the downstream effects of this new initiative will be. When we ask people from corrections, courts, or justice during the estimate hearings, they cannot tell us.

In the meantime, the only initiative that this Minister and this ministry have been able to come up with is to introduce the Sentencing Council, a body—which my colleague Chris Finlayson has talked about on numerous occasions—that is designed to do one thing: to create a buffer between the public’s expectations of sentencing by the Government and the incidence of something going wrong in a sentencing area. In the same way, the Government introduced district health boards to the health sector, so that when something went wrong in the health system the Government was simply able to say: “It’s nothing to do with us; it is all the district health boards. All we do is fund them.” The sentencing council will become the district health board of the justice sector, and we will see Government members stand up and say: “Oh, that parole outcome was nothing to do with us.”, or “That short sentence was nothing to do with us. Take it up with the Sentencing Council.” Well, that will not wash with the public of New Zealand at this coming election.

The other thing on the list of initiatives for appropriation is the conduct of the 2008 general election. Let us hope that we do not have a repeat of the 2005 conduct for the general election, where a credit card was funded by taxpayers. Let us hope that during the 2008 election we do not see another credit card funded by taxpayers.

We know too, as we look forward on these appropriations, about the implementation of the Coroners Act. We know that the Attorney-General was caught out by his own colleagues in not reappointing Garry Evans to the job of coroner. He had to back off once local members of the Labour Party, and Marian Hobbs, told him what a mistake he had made in implementing that piece of legislation and omitting such an experienced and neutral—neutral—coroner, who was prepared to make some tough calls.

So when we look ahead to the following 12 months from the time of this estimate being approved by the Committee, we know that it can only get better for the justice sector because the last 12 months have been an unequivocal disaster—for justice, for this Minister, and for corrections, courts, and the like. We will come to those organisations later in this estimates debate. But in the meantime, on those four or five issues I have raised this evening, this Minister has some explaining to do. He needs to explain why his department and his ministry have spent so much time worrying about the prison population, which they cannot forecast accurately in any shape or form. He also needs to explain why his ministry has not spent time talking about how to prevent crime and how to make sure that rehabilitation programmes in our prisons and in our justice system work and do not actually create better offending patterns for people who go on to those courses.

He needs to explain why drug and alcohol rehabilitation has been such a low priority for his Government when there are 8,000 inmates and only a couple of hundred specialist beds currently for drug and alcohol rehabilitation. He should answer some of the tough questions about his portfolio, which has been under the gun for so long—and the next 12 months will be no different.

Dr RICHARD WORTH (National) : So we had the Budget, and the estimates were referred to the Finance and Expenditure Committee. They were then allocated to various select committees for examination and have now come back to the Committee of the whole House. The estimates debate is a consideration of the appropriations being sought by the Government in respect of each vote.

Hon Lianne Dalziel: Are you giving a seminar?

Dr RICHARD WORTH: We are talking about Vote Justice for just a few moments. This, of course, is the flagship of profligacy. This is one of the great departments of State that is characterised by waste.

I would like to talk about three aspects, one of which Mr Power has already referred to—that is, the amazing concept that sits in behind the Sentencing Council. This is one of the Government’s significant policies. One would have thought—and I certainly think—that when a punishment is meted out, the sentence should fit the crime. Most New Zealanders would think that. But that is not to be the case here. We know, in respect of the Sentencing Council, which is a creature of the Criminal Justice Reform Bill, that a significant purpose is to control the prison muster. So the Sentencing Council will give directives to the judges as to the sentences they will impose in order that we can increase, or, more likely, decrease the prison muster. That has to be incredibly inappropriate. It is wholly lacking in what should characterise a strong legal system.

That is just one example, though. The Minister, of course, appeared before the Justice and Electoral Committee. I was not there, but my colleagues on it said that it was a sorry performance. And, of course, the estimate, Vote Justice, has been reported back in scripted form to this Committee. One of the issues discussed then related to legal aid. There is a great saying that the courts are open to everyone, like the Ritz Hotel, which means really that only the rich can afford access to justice. That is why we have legal aid. That is why the legal aid system must work. That is why the lawyers have been saying to the Minister that legal aid rates must be increased and that eligibility for legal aid must be strengthened and extended. Yet we have this sorry circumstance that is referred to in the estimates report where virtually nothing has been done.

The Minister reminded the committee that a review of remuneration rates was in progress, but, tellingly, the report continues that he was not in a position to indicate an outcome. That is a shabby indictment of what is said on page 398 of the Estimates. These are not difficult issues. One does not need to be particularly clever to see there is a problem, and move to a solution. Why are we pausing on this critical issue, which damages the integrity of the justice system?

I turn to another issue in the time remaining—that is, electoral reform. The Minister was even dodgier on this issue. In 2005, when I was on the committee, we carried out an inquiry arising from the 2005 general election. We made it clear that there was a need for reform in several areas of electoral law. The Government accepted that position. It also accepted that legislation needed to be enacted no later than November 2007. In the context of the Standing Orders, that time frame is impossible. We need a Minister who really believes in the justice system. We need a Minister who is strong, and I believe that New Zealanders have been badly let down by the present incumbent.

• Progress reported.

• Report adopted.