Financial Review Debate

The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy) Link to this

I have quite a bit to inform the Committee of.

The House is in Committee on the Appropriation (2007/08 Financial Review) Bill. The Standing Orders provide for the financial review debate to be the Committee stage of the Appropriation (2007/08 Financial Review) Bill. The debate comprises two distinct elements—it would be helpful if members were able to absorb this as we progress through the debate. The financial review debate commences with a debate on the annual financial statements of the Government as reported by the Finance and Expenditure Committee. Once this debate is disposed of, the Committee debates the individual financial reviews of departments and Offices of Parliament, and non-departmental appropriations, as reported on by select committees.

Members will note that, for the first time, this portion of the debate includes debate on non-departmental appropriations. Members will recall that changes adopted last year to the Standing Orders provide for non-departmental appropriations—section 32A reports—to be subject to parliamentary scrutiny. Although the services and outputs covered by non-departmental appropriations are provided by other organisations, an administering department, as the name suggests, has some responsibility for these appropriations and for reporting on them. A list of financial reviews and non-departmental appropriations available for debate is on the Table.

The debate on the Government’s financial position may be fairly wide ranging, but the debates on the individual financial reviews of departments and Offices of Parliament and on non-departmental appropriations should be relevant to their performance in the 2007-08 financial year and to their current operations. A member may have no more than two calls on each financial review. Four hours is allowed for both elements of the financial review debate. At the conclusion of the 4 hours, a single question is put on the provisions of the bill. There is no amendment or debate on this question. The Chairperson reports the bill to the House, and it is set down for third reading forthwith; there is no debate on the third reading.

The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy) Link to this

I ask that members turn to the report of the Finance and Expenditure Committee on the annual financial statements of the Government. The question is that the report of the Finance and Expenditure Committee on the annual financial statements of the Government for the year ended 30 June 2008 be noted. I note that this report also relates to the Finance and Expenditure Committee’s financial review of Treasury, so the performance in the 2007-08 financial year and current operations of Treasury may also be debated.

Hon DAVID CUNLIFFE (Labour—New Lynn) Link to this

It is entirely appropriate that you reference those financial statements, Mr Chair; I recommend them for people’s reading.

I begin with a quote: “It is part of the New Zealand way of life that when New Zealanders face economic uncertainty, they look to their Government not necessarily to take away that uncertainty but to show a path through it.” What have New Zealanders found out today? They found out today that in the face of growing uncertainty in the world economy and in our own economy, this Government has no idea what it is doing. The quote is from Bill English.

Despite the fact that National inherited a sound economy from the previous Labour Government—with, by the Minister’s own admission, some of the strongest growth, lowest debt, and lowest unemployment in the Western World—it is true that we stand in this Chamber today on a day when unemployment is forecast to rise by another 60,000 this year. Sixty thousand workers, 60,000 families—60,000-plus New Zealanders—fear for their homes and livelihoods, and they are wondering how they will put bread on the table.

This situation is a serious economic challenge. We have spoken about it many times in this House. The reports today bear upon the truth of the matter. Rather than the world economy growing by 2 percent this year, it will shrink by nearly 6 percent. It is an unprecedented falling off the cliff for the global economy. It hurts us in two ways: New Zealand businesses out there in the world cannot borrow like they used to, and we cannot export our services. But that is the world as it is. What concerns the Opposition—and, I think, all New Zealanders—is the Government’s response to that situation. The response has been inadequate on a number of fronts. National’s construction of the stimulus it has put into this economy is misleading and overstated; it largely re-brands work Labour did prior to the election. The programme includes double-counting, low-quality investments, and smoke and mirrors.

National’s tax cuts—the centrepiece of its programme—are completely inappropriate. The tax cuts take nearly $1 billion from the poor—those below - average income earners—and give it to the wealthy. One-third of the total tax remission goes to the top 3 percent of earners, and 70 percent of New Zealanders with children get nothing at all. People who earn less than $40,000 and have children get nothing—nothing at all. The economics of that situation are lunacy. We all know, and all the commentators know, that the wealthy will save or otherwise dispose of—but not spend—what they get in tax cuts. That is why the multiplier is lower for tax cuts for those on higher incomes than it is for tax cuts for those at the bottom. Not only are National’s tax cuts inequitable but they make no economic sense, either.

The so-called rolling maul of initiatives has been the subject of much debate over the last few days. It was one thing for Bill English to describe his leader as hopping benignly from cloud to cloud. It kind of suited the spin—if anyone still believes it—that somehow “Labour-lite” in drag got elected. Now the truth is clear: what the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister think are completely different. The Minister said this weekend that there is no way the Government will fund $50 million for a cycleway—not this year, he said with a smirk, and not next year or the year after. The Prime Minister says that we will come out of the recession aggressively in 2009; the Minister says we certainly will not. They cannot even agree on the nature of the problem, so how can we hope they will agree on the solution? They cannot even agree on the problem.

The term “rolling maul” was convenient when National believed that it could get out initiatives in dribs and drabs and that New Zealanders would somehow be satisfied with that, but we come back to the Minister’s own words. New Zealanders do not expect the Government to take away the international recession, but they expect a credible game plan upon which to invest and build their businesses, and that will protect their families. This Government has no such plan. It has a series of contradictory show pony initiatives, like the cycleway to nowhere. In the background the Government is cut, cut, cutting its way deeper into the recession.

JOHN BOSCAWEN (ACT) Link to this

We have just heard from Mr Cunliffe on the issue of the recession, the things that are driving the recession, and the Government’s response to the recession. I will come back to a theme that I have been speaking about over the last 2 or 3 weeks. Many things have contributed to the recession, and I believe that one of the things that have contributed to it has been the collapse of so many finance companies as well as the losses that have been incurred by investors in those finance companies. I have publicly called for an inquiry at the Commerce Committee level, and I have had tentative, encouraging support from the Labour and National members of the committee. I will discuss a related issue this afternoon, the collapse of the Blue Chip group of companies.

Blue Chip, as such, was not a finance company but a company that was involved in raising money from the public, which actually raises issues of whether it complied with the Securities Act or whether it was required to comply with the Securities Act. Many people have lost money in the Blue Chip collapse. I guess they fall into different categories. In some cases people have invested in apartments developed or built by Blue Chip and have received those apartments. Those apartments may well be worth less today than when they purchased them, but nevertheless they have received those apartments. They may have bought those apartments because of misrepresentations but nevertheless they have apartments. Another group of investors have paid deposits for apartments but are yet to receive them, and those deposits are being held in trust for those investors, pending settlement. A number of legal actions are arising out of that.

I will focus this afternoon on another group of investors. These investors entered into agreements to buy apartments that were to be built for them. There are three cases where companies associated with the Blue Chip group of companies sold apartments off the plans to investors, and some 400 to 500 people purchased these apartments, paid deposits on them, and entered into agreements to release those funds.

Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance) Link to this

Reviewing the 2007-08 financial year in the financial review debate, which is the Committee stage of the Appropriation (2007/08 Financial Review) Bill gives us an opportunity to assess just where New Zealand started from in trying to deal with the global recession. The fact is that when the National came into Government in late 2008, the economy had already been in recession for about three quarters—that is, three 2008 quarters. The most pervasive problems, though, that the Government inherited were probably the twin chronic deficits.

The first of those was a fiscal deficit, which occurs when Government expenditure exceeds its revenue. The Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update issued about 6 weeks before the November election showed, even then, before the global recession had struck, that the previous Government was projecting 10 years of deficits. That was off the back of 6 or 7 years when the economy had been growing strongly. Unfortunately, since the 2005 election, in Labour’s scandal-ridden, misdirected, and hopeless last term in Government, expenditure got out of control. The Government was already projecting deficits, then the global recession came along in the latter part of 2008, leaving the incumbent Government with a significant fiscal problem. But that was not the only deficit.

The other deficit was the balance of payments deficit. It is interesting that, in the light of recent events, no doubt many good things that were not said while he was Minister of Finance will now be said about Dr Cullen. One of the things he claimed when he came into office with the Labour Government in 1999 was that the current account deficit was far too big. At that time, it was about 4 or 5 percent of GDP. That has demonstrated that New Zealanders were not saving enough. We were reliant on overseas borrowing. Well, after 9 years of growth—

Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) Link to this

We heard the Hon Bill English launch into an attack on the previous Government, accusing us of being scandal-ridden. This is from the Government that, in the last week, has had Dr Worth on the ropes for inappropriate behaviour as a Minister whilst in India, in clear breach of the Cabinet Manual, which the Prime Minister and his Cabinet colleagues, including the Hon Bill English, are happy to look past. He should not come to us and accuse the Labour Party of being a scandal-ridden Government and then condone that sort of inappropriate behaviour in the National Government.

I will refer to another comment made by the Minister in the chair, Bill English. He said that he had inherited a terrible set of affairs from the outgoing Labour Government. Again, there is rote learning going on in the National Government. It tries to pass this disease on to the media, but the media are not buying it, because they know it is not true. Not only does the media know it is not true but also the IMF has reinforced it, just in the last 2 weeks. The IMF says in its macroeconomic outlook for New Zealand, in its report dated 23 March 2009, that “New Zealand is in a better position than most advanced countries to face the global storm, given its sound macroeconomic policies, including a flexible exchange rate, low level of public debt, flexible labor markets, and healthy banking sector.”

CRAIG FOSS (National—Tukituki) Link to this

I rise to speak on the financial review of the financial statements of the Government of New Zealand for the year ended 30 June last year. I speak after one or two other speakers and I would like to address some of the points they have raised that pertain to the report on the Table here.

I will pick up the theme of an earlier speaker because once again my suspicions have been confirmed about the tax cut and election-result denying members opposite. I cannot for the life of me believe that on the one hand they say we need more money—and before the election they said their party was the tax cut party and they legislated for that because they did not trust Dr Cullen or themselves to follow through with it—but now, post-election, the theme of almost every single speech they give is that we should not have tax cuts; they are starting to put forward the old redistribution line. I look forward to hearing other speakers clarify whether Labour members agree with us in relation to the tax cuts put in place on 1 April this year as a result of the National Party victory at the last election. Do they agree with those tax cuts—yes or no? Do they agree with the fact that so many hard-working New Zealanders have missed out over the last few years? Yes, we agreed with and signed up for Working for Families; yes, we agreed and signed up for indexation of many of the benefits; but do Labour members agree with tax cuts?

What I am hearing from members opposite right now is that they do not believe that every New Zealander, from those on an average wage and higher, and probably those on below the average wage, should have more of their own funds when there is a surplus, and, funnily enough, they do not believe that a recessionary environment, which this Government inherited, is an apt time to leave more money in the pockets of those who earned it in the first place. Listening to an earlier speaker, David Cunliffe—a gentleman who apparently does not have a site on Twitter—I do not understand how Labour members say that the fiscal stimulus should be bigger and wider, yet they argue against tax cuts. I cannot quite work it out and I will be interested to hear other speakers try to clarify the issue and move the clouds away from the policy, because members opposite have so much time on their hands, post-election.

Last week I spoke on this issue in another debate and I made the point that the clock starts ticking for this particular Government at the end of this Budget. After the May 2009 Budget the clock will start ticking for this Government, because that is what we will be judged on. We will not be judged on what we inherited—Budget 2008, the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update or the things that were not in it, the half-year update, or even the Budget Policy Statement, which is an indication for the next year’s Budget. We will start to be judged on the accounts as they are put before this Parliament when the Hon Bill English presents the Budget in 2009. That is when the decade of deficits—and they are looking horrible at this moment—will be revealed. That is when the true state of the accident compensation numbers, which a previous speaker started to allude to—or even to deny, if I am allowed to say that—and the true state of the New Zealand accounts will be placed before the New Zealand public. Unfortunately they were not placed before us earlier.

I acknowledge all of the members of the Finance and Expenditure Committee, who helped to contribute to the financial review we have in front of us. There was some robust debate and some good issues arose from it. If members read the review they will see that there are some acknowledgments as to the state of play that was inherited by the incoming National Government. In fact many of the matters that were talked about, theorised on, written about, hui-ed for, and consulted on by the previous Government were not put in place, and that is the key. Actions speak so much louder than words.

Another member opposite kept talking about the structural deficit. I will be very interested to hear another speaker talk about that. It is obvious now that there has been a structural deficit in New Zealand’s accounts for quite some time. The risks inherent in New Zealand’s accounts have not been portrayed as accurately as they probably could, and the accounts have not been portrayed as conservatively as they probably could, and we will see the results of that when the May 2009 Budget is released and put on the Table by the Hon Bill English. The previous speaker also talked about the superannuation fund, which Dr Cullen was the architect of—we all acknowledge that, quite deliberately.

The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy) Link to this

Just before I call the member who will have the next call, I say that interjections are fine. But I ask members to look at Speakers’ ruling 61/5, which covers a running commentary. In respect of interjections, the test is whether they are rare and reasonable, and during the previous speech we shifted very clearly into a running commentary. I ask members to show a little bit of restraint. Interjections are fine, but we will not have running commentaries.

Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South) Link to this

One of the problems with this debate is that we appear to be living in two worlds. One is the real world, and one is a world that appears to be inhabited by the Prime Minister and occasionally by Bill English. To get right to the nub of the issue, one has to ask this question: does the Government have a debt problem at the moment, or did it inherit a debt problem? It is clear from the international commentary, whether it is from the IMF or the World Bank, and from the comments made by John Key and Bill English early in the time of holding their current positions, that the previous Government did a very, very good job during the time under review—and, in fact, for the 8 years before that—of positioning the Government and the Government’s books in such a way that we could sustain a period of downturn.

But there is nothing like someone who suddenly becomes, as Bill English is, a previous position denier. It is a bit like the climate change deniers or the Holocaust deniers. He is now consistently denying the very good position that he inherited. He is someone who now knows that if he had the choice again, he would not make the tax cuts that came into force on 1 April. They were wrong. They were wrong in their totality, but especially they were wrong in their distribution. Part of the job is to link economic policy with fiscal policy, and that is what Bill English did not do in this particular area. Fiscally he probably got it just about right, but, as a result of the distribution of the tax cuts, economically he got it very, very wrong indeed.

I will make a prediction. Sources that are normally very, very well informed have told me that on Budget night in May the Minister of Finance will not only announce but will pass through all its stages a bill that will reverse the tax cuts for the out-years. Bill English will get up in this Chamber on Budget day and say that before members are allowed to go home, the Government will, under urgency, undo the tax cuts for the out-years—the tax cuts that we have already legislated for.

CHRIS TREMAIN (National—Napier) Link to this

I rise to take a call on the 2007-08 financial review. I will refer to a few comments from Mr Mallard and Mr Cunliffe, who stood and made disparaging remarks about the Government. Mr Cunliffe said that Mr English said New Zealanders should look to the Government to show a pathway through, and that is exactly what this Government is doing. It is showing a clear and decisive pathway through this recession. We are here to blunt the edges of this recession, and to provide a platform from which this country can grow as world trade conditions improve and as we come out of the economic downturn.

I want to follow up on a few of the comments made by Mr Cunliffe today. He talked about New Zealand inheriting a strong position. He said that the National Government had inherited high growth. I do not know what dreamland Mr Cunliffe lives in, but to say that we came into a position of high growth is absolutely ridiculous. We all know that from 1 January to 31 March 2008, the first quarter of that year, New Zealand was in a position of negative growth. I do not know how that translates into a position of high growth. The fact of the matter was that we were already in recession, brought on by Labour’s structural expenses. We were already in a position—[Interruption] That member knows we were already in recession. We did not inherit high growth; we were already in a position of negative growth. Mr Cunliffe then went on to say we were in a position of low debt. Yes, I acknowledge that in New Zealand we did have low debt as a percentage of GDP.

But let us have a look at the facts. The reality is that over the last 20 years, debt to GDP in this country has dropped like a stone. The biggest drop in debt to GDP was through the 1990s, where it plummeted; it absolutely plummeted. It is absolute rubbish for Labour members to get up on their high horse and say they paid back debt. What happened is that as the economy grew, the debt to GDP ratio dropped. That is what happened. The previous Government did not pay back any debt; the debt to GDP ratio dropped as the economy grew. This country had some of the best economic growth in a generation, created by companies in New Zealand and world trade. It had nothing to do with the previous Labour Government, except perhaps the one exception of company tax rate drops, which occurred late in Labour’s last term in office. Can members name another policy that really improved economic growth across this country in Labour’s 9 years in office? It was limited.

Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills) Link to this

I am pleased to have the opportunity to participate in this financial review of the Ministry of Health. Over the last 9 years Labour focused on investing in health across the entire spectrum of the portfolio, from disease prevention to anti-obesity measures, record low adult smoking rates, increased screening for diseases, increased immunisation rates, decreased general practitioners’ fees, decreased prescription charges, increased elective surgery, more nurses, more doctors, record pay increases for nurses, and 33 new or upgraded hospitals from Kaitāia to Invercargill. I pay tribute to the three Ministers of Health during those 9 years: the Hon Annette King, the Hon Peter Hodgson, and the Hon David Cunliffe.

At the time of the election campaign last year—well, for most of it, anyway, not all of it, and I will talk a bit more about that later—National campaigned on the slogan “better, sooner, more convenient health services”. That was the mantra; that was the Crosby/Textor line from the National Government—“better, sooner, more convenient health services”. But it is very difficult for any member of the public to be able to say now that that is what we are getting. It is very difficult for members of the public to relate what they heard consistently in that Crosby/Textor messaging—“better, sooner, more convenient health services”—to what they see when they look at what we actually have.

Just today in the House, for example, I gave the Minister several examples of cuts to front-line services, and of increased costs for accessing health services by ordinary New Zealanders, who will be very, very confused by the conflict between the message they heard before the election and what they are seeing now. For example, I asked the Minister about his decision to allow MidCentral District Health Board to cancel its clinical services and mobile bus. How could that Minister justify the over 100-kilometre journey on a substandard road, with no financial travel assistance available, for the good people of Dannevirke? But the Minister had the audacity to say that that was in order to fund better services somewhere else. So the people in Dannevirke should hear that message: “You don’t count; there is nothing at all of interest to this Government in the fact that you will now be paying substantial amounts of money to travel on a substandard road, often in very dangerous weather conditions, when unwell already.” Obviously, because of the nature of people’s visits—they are going to access health services—they are not making those visits when they are feeling 100 percent. But the Minister just said that that was all right because it meant that the Government could pay for something else.

That response makes an absolute fallacy of the message we heard from the Minister before the election, as does the fact that with the latest situation in relation to Capital and Coast District Health Board’s paediatric oncology services, our children and families will once again be forced to travel away from Wellington to receive treatment. Rather than try to develop a sustainable response or look for a sustainable solution to the fact that in Wellington there were so few cases that that service would now be considered borderline in terms of providing the service and meeting health and safety measures, the Minister suddenly said that it was all up to Capital and Coast District Health Board. He said that the district health board should be working for a solution, and he washed his hands of it—as I am showing members now, and as he did time after time in relation to health. He washed his hands of Ministerial responsibility. Suddenly, the buck is to stop with the district health board. Well, I want to tell the Minister that actually he is the one collecting the fat pay cheque. It is his bottom on the seat of a Crown car. He is the one with people working in his—Minister Ryall’s—office, not district health board personnel. And it is with that Minister that the buck stops in regard to this vote.

We have had numerous examples of direct cuts to front-line services. I raised another one in relation to health quite recently, which was with regard to access to the mobile breast-screening unit. Previously it had been travelling the whole length of the West Coast, including Buller. So the women from Punakaiki right through to Karamea who were eligible for breast screening just had to walk down the road. They just had to go down the road to get their breast screening—in fact, in the very same way as staff in the Minister’s office can just walk out to the forecourt of Parliament and have breast screening in the mobile bus. But now, women in Karamea, in Waimangaroa, in Granity, and right through to Westport and all the towns in between and down to Punakaiki and Charleston have had that service threatened because BreastScreen South has built a new unit in Greymouth, and it wants people to go there rather than to the mobile clinic. Well, that makes sense in theory, but how can the Minister justify his decision to allow the West Coast District Health Board to transfer the cost of travel on to those women in Karamea, Seddonville, Granity, Fairdown, Waimangaroa, and right away through to Punakaiki? Why do those women have to bear the cost of the cuts? It is because that Minister has let the district health board do it.

I had the local member of Parliament, Chris Auchinvole, running down the corridor after me, flapping his arms and saying that he had fixed it: “I have now got a solution to this.” But I went and researched that, and I say to the Minister and to the current member—the very single-term, I think member of Parliament for West Coast - Tasman—that no solution has been found, because BreastScreen South said to the women of Buller: “We will reinstate the mobile service. It will make one more visit to Buller, so that women from Buller only have to go down the road for their breast screening. But we will not reinstate it permanently; we will have only one more trip north. And tell the women of Buller ‘Get used to travelling.’ ” That is a direct quote: “And tell the women of Buller ‘Get used to travelling.’ ”

As I said in my introductory comments, before the election we had a promise from National of better, sooner, and more convenient health services. But we have seen cuts to surgery lists on the West Coast. We have sent cuts to jobs in both the Taranaki District Health Board and the Tairāwhiti District Health Board. We have seen cuts to home support services for the most vulnerable people in our community—disabled people and elderly at home in need of support—in South Canterbury and, I understand, in Southland, as well.

We have lost the paediatric oncology team at Capital and Coast District Health Board. We lost, then reinstated, and are going to lose again, the breast-screening bus on the West Coast. We have no guarantee of school nurse services in our 10 district health boards. The Minister announced a $10 million ambulance service injection, which was one-third of the money that the Ambulance Services Association already had, and even that pittance has not arrived yet. In fact, 20 percent of the money that was committed by the previous Government for ambulance services—and not even that—has arrived.

Today, just to put the icing on the cake, I exposed the fact that last week the Minister, in another self-promoting move, had announced that he had personally reviewed—I am sure while sitting at the bach in Tauranga—the travel service policy and now, in a grand announcement, said he was going to increase the funding. He said the increase would be the first one in 20 years, but that comment is totally untrue. In 2005 the Labour-led Government reviewed the travel policy and increased that very fund by $36 million. The Minister was wrong in that statement. He was also wrong in his answers to a supplementary question in the House, which he had to hastily adjust. It is very clear that he does not have his head around the facts of the portfolio. It is quite sad, to be honest, that he does not have his heart in, or any passion for, the portfolio. Everyone in the capital city, village as it is, knows that he did not want to be Minister of Health. We knew prior to the election that he wanted a different portfolio.

Hon TONY RYALL (Minister of Health) Link to this

The previous speaker really is struggling. What we have seen with Ruth Dyson is that she takes an incorrect media report and does a beat-up in order to try to make it the full story. For example, she said there had been cuts to elective surgery on the West Coast. But the West Coast District Health Board tells us that there are no cuts to elective surgery on the West Coast. The member then told a story about all the extra money that the previous Labour Government had put into the national travel allowance. Well, how come the mileage allowance of 20c a kilometre being paid to people had not increased for 20 years? That is the advice I have received from the Ministry of Health, but that is not what the member said. The other week the member talked about the cancellation of the breast-screening unit in the West Coast and Buller areas, and she said that women would have to travel. Today she admitted that the service is being reinstated, but then she said that the unit is under threat for the next year. She really is struggling.

Let me educate that member on what her Government’s failed administration did to the New Zealand public health system. After 9 years of doubling the health budget, fewer people are receiving elective surgery on a per head of population basis. After 9 years of doubling the health budget there has been only a 0.7 percent increase in the number of people getting a first specialist assessment in a public hospital. After 9 years of doubling the health budget, 180 New Zealand men and women were being sent to Australia for cancer treatment. After 9 years of doubling the health budget, we have a massive health workforce crisis across the entire public health system. After 9 years of doubling the health budget, a whole lot of vulnerable services right across district health boards are hanging by a thread because of the neglect of members opposite when in Government in terms of dealing with those issues. What is worse, Labour members stood up and told the country that district health board deficits were only $110 million. We know that those deficits are heading to over $160 million, according to the advice I received from district health boards just before Christmas.

We know that this is going to be a challenging time in health. Not only are we suffering the effects of a workforce crisis that was neglected, ignored, and denied for 9 years but also we are facing the major financial challenges that are besetting this country. But the Government is taking action. Within weeks we introduced our voluntary bonding scheme, which offers student loan write-offs and cash grants to doctors, nurses, and midwives who agree to work in hard-to-staff areas and communities for up to 5 years. We know that that will make a significant difference. We also acted swiftly to increase the number of general practitioner training places in the wider public health service, and we will further increase that number next year. The Government has also announced its plan to increase the number of medical student training places in our universities next year, as well. We are taking action to deal with the workforce crisis that we have inherited.

We have also taken action to deal with some of the major issues that New Zealanders are faced with in the health service. How can the funding double in 9 years, yet we end up with fewer services? Well, a lot of it is to do with the unchecked massive growth in bureaucracy in the New Zealand public health system, where the number of managers and administrators grew by 25 percent over that 9-year period—from 8,000 to 10,500. That increase is a huge burden on the public health service, and it will take a while to fix the problem as we move resources from the back office to the front line.

This Government is determined that it will not have a doubling of the health budget and fewer people getting care. It just does not make sense. This Government is determined to work with our district health boards and our front-line doctors and nurses in order to improve the services that New Zealanders have. When the Budget is tabled in Parliament in a month or so, New Zealanders will see that this is a Government that they can trust with the New Zealand public health service. It is a Government that is committed to improving the services that New Zealanders receive and improving those front-line health services that are so important to our communities.

KEVIN HAGUE (Green) Link to this

I want to take this opportunity to take up a line of questioning and thinking that I first pursued with the Health Committee’s review of the Ministry of Health. The Minister of Health, Mr Ryall, when in Opposition had a particular focus on waiting times for elective surgery. Even though elective surgery represents perhaps 5 percent of what the publicly funded health sector actually does, and even though it is a topic that is beset by complications because it lies across the boundary between the public system and the private system, the waiting times for elective surgery make for an easy target because of the emotional charge associated with waiting for needed surgery. It did not matter to him that the often-criticised system for prioritising and booking elective surgery was, in fact, developed under the National Government of the 1990s.

The health sector has watched with interest to see how a politician with such an expedient political focus while in Opposition would make the transition to ministerial responsibility for the sector. The answer is in, and it is “not very well”. The politically easy targets for an Opposition politician—waiting times for elective surgery, emergency departments, and radiotherapy, and railing against bureaucracy—have, unfortunately, continued to be that Minister’s focus. To compound his failure to adapt to his new role, he has adopted a public style from the Joan Collins school of management: “Do it my way, or you’re all fired.”

What is at stake here is not just the Minister’s misplaced enthusiasms. There has been a bipartisan consensus around the need to greatly strengthen our programmes to keep people well in the first place through public health, and to treat illness as early as possible and in the patient’s own community through primary care. This necessarily requires a relative deprioritisation of hospital-based care, particularly at the most specialised high-tech and expensive end. This is not just some idea of New Zealand’s but, rather, reflects the common global understanding of what is required to combat, in particular, the rapidly rising tide of long-term conditions that will otherwise swamp health services.

I had the greatest of difficulty in obtaining a copy of Minister Ryall’s letter of expectations for district health boards, and, to date, I have not yet received a copy from his office. It is no wonder that is the case. Rather than continuing the practice of his predecessors of emphasising the broad strategic direction, primary care merits only a cursory mention in that document. This, at least, is one mention more than the other issues get, such as keeping people well, equipping New Zealand to deal with chronic conditions, and reducing health inequalities, including taking action to address the national emergency in Māori health. This is important, because district health boards will take their steer from the Minister’s priorities—if they do not improve radiotherapy waiting times, boards will get the sack. So will the district health boards focus on that, or on improving access to primary care for Māori, for example?

Nobody is arguing that improving waiting times and moving patients faster through emergency departments in order to maximise productivity and minimise waiting times are not important things to do. The fact is that district health boards have over the past year or so been placing a very great emphasis on quality improvements and workforce development to achieve precisely that. Edicts and threats may convey an action man image, but they simply do not help. At some point in the not too distant future the Minister will begin to understand the complexity of the health sector. Let us hope that in the meantime the progress that has been made towards meeting the real challenges does not sustain too much damage from his desire for simplistic and politically expedient solutions.

NATHAN GUY (National—Ōtaki) Link to this

The Committee will be interested to know that the member who has just resumed his seat was the former chief executive of the West Coast District Health Board when its services collapsed. I just wanted the Committee to be aware of that.

When we review the performance of the previous Labour Government, I want the Committee to be aware that when the previous Minister of Health, David Cunliffe, got to his feet during question time and told everyone not to worry because he was running the show, the health budget had been doubled yet services were deteriorating across New Zealand. Waiting lists were allowed to grow, and bureaucracy was bloated. It ballooned out of control by 25 percent. There were 8,000 bureaucrats in the health departments across New Zealand. That number grew not only under the previous Minister of Health but also under several former Ministers before that member. It grew from 8,000 to 10,500, which is a growth of 25 percent. The growth was not going into the front line, where we want to get more services, but into the middle and the back lines. The number of people who sit at desks was out of control, and that will be a huge challenge for this Government to address in order to get services to the front line.

We have some big challenges in the health sector. But I want to back up the very good current Minister for Health, the Hon Tony Ryall, for what he has done in the first 4 months in his job in Cabinet. He has announced a very good voluntary bonding scheme for doctors across hard-to-staff places around New Zealand. I want the Committee to think about and remember this fact: under the previous Labour Government, New Zealand was the biggest exporter and, would you believe this, the biggest importer of doctors. How ridiculous it is that taxpayers across New Zealand fund doctors through their training to, hopefully, work in this country—and indeed, they are allowed to have choice about that—but that doctors make the choice to leave New Zealand because we do not have the right incentives to keep them here. That is why, now, people across New Zealand, with the 1 April tax cuts, are saluting Prime Minister John Key and the National Government, and saying: “Yes, at last!”. They know we will create the right incentives for people to work harder and get ahead. Is it not an embarrassment that under the previous Labour Government there were more doctors leaving than staying in New Zealand? Thankfully, we have a bonding scheme that will work across most of New Zealand.

I also want to touch on the ambulance services and a pilot that will be provided by Wellington Free Ambulance in the Ōtaki electorates, which will have more paramedics coming into my electorate. They will be looking after people in their homes in order to reduce the services that are required in Kenepuru Hospital and in Wellington Regional Hospital. A great initiative is to be piloted in the Kapiti community whereby Wellington Free Ambulance paramedics will see the sick and the elderly in my community, and treat them in their own homes. I think this is a fantastic initiative.

Across New Zealand there are a whole lot of other issues that the Minister for Health is also addressing. Right now, we have to get on, and we have to redirect the services provided by the district health boards. We have to focus on the front line, and that is where I believe that the Minister is doing a fantastic job. I say “Well done!” to Tony Ryall for getting on and doing things in his first 4 months in office. He has had to pick up the pieces from the mess left by the previous Labour Government, and to concentrate on the front-line services needed to look after the most needy people in our community.

Hon TONY RYALL (Minister of Health) Link to this

It is worth noting that we are talking about the 2007-08 financial review of the Ministry of Health and the period of time subsequent to that. It would be worth reflecting on the fact that during the financial year that is under review, the previous Government tabled its budget for the 2008-09 year. What many New Zealanders do not realise is that in the weeks in the run-up to the general election, the Labour Government stripped out $150 million from the future funding path in health. Not a lot of people know that—the Labour Government cut $50 million out of the health budget for next year and $100 million out of the indicative funding path for the following year. So a total of $150 million was cut from future health funding by the Labour Government. Not a lot of people know that.

I give that information to the Committee because one of the biggest challenges we have inherited in the health service is dealing with a track towards financial crisis right across the district health boards. We have indicated to district health boards that although they are getting more money next year, like the previous Government we are expecting them to do their level best to improve services for New Zealanders, but we are also expecting them to track towards achieving a financial balance over time. But that is made a lot harder by the fact that Labour cut $50 million out of the future health budget for the next financial year, and $100 million out of the budget in 2 years’ time. So Labour cut $150 million out of the health budget.

But, having said that, I know that district health boards are committed to working constructively with the Government to meet the many challenges that we are facing in the district health board system. Those challenges are very significant. I reckon the biggest challenge we face concerns the workforce—workforce, and workforce. The Government is taking action to deal with the health workforce crisis. Not only do we have the voluntary bonding and the increased numbers of general practitioner training places and medical student places but we are also working across the sector to try to find additional places for nursing and other surgical training.

This Government is committed to increasing the availability of elective surgery through our plan to build dedicated elective surgery centres across the country. The premise of this plan is based on international and national research that shows that if we can split acute or urgent surgery from elective surgery, then we will get much better elective surgery performance.

Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE (Labour—Waimakariri) Link to this

This is an interesting report. I note—because we are also discussing current operations—that the Minister in the chair has adopted, on coming into Government, a very interesting strategy. The Minister inherited, when she came into Government, an escape rate from prison that had dropped by 84 percent over a decade. The Minister, of course, took the credit for that, as she went around and told us that she had visited a number of prisons—not to propose measures that she ought to put forward, but to ask people how she should do her job. As we have noted in this House, under the previous Government there was an 84 percent reduction in prison escapes. If members look at the litany of escapes, suicides, and assaults that have occurred in the 3 or 4 months since this Minister took office—we will not go into the area of the police, because, sadly, we are not in the position at this point to debate the financial review of the New Zealand Police—we can see that there have been more escapes in that time than there were in the last 3 years.

This Minister has embarked on a very interesting strategy, but I think it will be seen as having been fraught with danger when we review it in the coming years. She paraded around the country and was going to be the tough person. She was the Minister who was going to crack down on everything, including when the Auditor-General delivered a very robust report that outlined that procedures in the Department of Corrections had not been put in place. The department failed to do this even though it had been instructed to do so under the previous Government, and even though the Wellington Coroner reviewed those procedures and had no recommendations to make because—in his view—the procedures were there and were up and running. This Minister said she would sort that out. On the back of the Auditor-General’s report came a thundering from across the House from Judith Collins. She said heads would roll—members may remember that the Prime Minister was into that, as well as her—and there would be accountability. The chief executive officer of the Department of Corrections was put on notice; everybody was put on notice.

But I will give the Minister credit for this: she did, quite rightly, call in the State Services Commissioner, the employer of the Minister’s chief executive—he reported direct to her—and ask the commissioner to do a report that would tell her what was going on and who was accountable. But prior to that, the Minister bagged and gagged the chief executive officer of the Department of Corrections so he could not respond to the Auditor-General’s report. She also pre-empted the report she had asked for from the employer, of course. The Minister then put taxpayers’ money in jeopardy. We know this, because the chief executive officer told the Law and Order Committee that he had not ruled out legal action, at least at the time, in respect of his employment arrangements, and that would have been a cost to the taxpayer. When the report came out, the chief executive officer said he was staying. The Minister stated that she had no confidence in the chief executive officer before the report had come out, and no confidence in him after the report came out.

The question we have for the Prime Minister is, who is accountable? The New Zealand people sit there and hear a lot of bluster and bluff and stomping of feet from the Minister. She stomped around the country and said she would get tough and sort the department out. But is the Minister accountable today? Is the chief executive officer accountable? Of course, the New Zealand people sit there and wonder who is accountable. The report notes a very interesting thing. It says, under the accountability section—I know National members wanted this to be included—that New Zealand Labour Party members asked extensive questions about the working relationship between the Minister and the chief executive. The working relationship goes straight to the heart of public confidence in this department. I say to the Minister, as she embarks on her strategy and tries to make a case for private prisons, that if she cannot get accountability out of a department that she has direct control of via her chief executive officer—a single report—then how on earth will she get accountability from a private sector organisation with a contract that is far removed from that relationship, and in a situation where the chief executive must participate in the tender and also decide, effectively, who gets the tender? I ask that Minister how on earth she will get accountability, because she cannot get accountability now.

Is this just a case where Judith Collins will be able to say—as she says when anything goes wrong in her departments, whether it is in respect of the New Zealand Police or the Department of Corrections—that it is an operational matter, and she will wash her hands of it? It was not an operational matter when Labour was in Government, according to the speeches that National members made. Not only will it be an operational matter but it will also be a matter that is in the hands of the private sector, if the Government goes down the way of contracting with a private sector company. The relationship with the company will be far removed from the Minister. I ask members whether the Auditor-General will be able to investigate such a company in the way that he did in the case of the department, or whether the select committee will be able to do so. I ask whether this Parliament will be able to call people in and question them, and whether the Official Information Act will be able to come into play. As we were told at the select committee, we will now have a layer of highly expensive monitors who will do the Minister’s job and monitor the performance of this department.

Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Corrections) Link to this

When we took over the Department of Corrections, we were left with somewhat of a mess in some areas. This department had five Labour, or lackey, Ministers in the corrections portfolio over those 9 years. Frankly, there is a roll-call of shame. I understand from the department that there was a general feeling that things did not really need to change, because staff outlived their Ministers. Well, we have news for anyone who holds that view.

I have read the Law and Order Committee’s financial review of the department, and I noticed that a very large transcript of the evidence is contained in it. I cannot see anything there to suggest that the Hon Clayton Cosgrove, or anyone else in the Labour Party, really seemed to care very much about what had happened in the department during the term of the financial review. The entire transcript seems to be nothing much more than a case of the Labour members trying to make something of the fact that I actually require accountability in the department and that the department is delivering on it.

SANDRA GOUDIE (National—Coromandel) Link to this

I am delighted to follow the Minister in the chair, Judith Collins, who is doing an excellent job of showing the leadership that is required in the Department of Corrections. That leadership just was not there under the previous Government. We had 9 long years, and what happened? It all went backwards. Not once did Labour members show a level of concern about what was happening in the Department of Corrections. They were far more interested in engaging in character assassination during the financial review of that department. We have only to look at the reoffending statistics. If members of the previous Labour Government had really looked at those statistics, then they would have seen there was a problem that they needed to address, but they did not.

It is stated in the Auditor-General’s report that the chief executive and the department were telling the Minister that there were problems; the Labour members had only to read it. If they had listened at the time to what was being said, then they might have addressed the problems. After the death of Karl Kuchenbecker, corrections officers had to ensure that offenders complied with the particular requirements of their sentence or order and ensure that staff complied with Community Probation and Psychological Services procedures. This posed a significant cultural shift for some staff that could not be underestimated. The Minister of the day was told that at the time—and I understand that that Minister was Phil Goff, the current Leader of the Opposition—but he was not listening. He did not take on board that advice, and he did not recognise that it was a significant issue.

So what did we end up with? We have 20 recommendations from the Audit Office, and I will just run by members one of those recommendations. I will look at recommendation No. 11, which is that the department completes the required reintegration checklist during the first week of an offender’s period on parole. If we look at the reintegration of offenders into the community, we see the report states that out of the 100 files that were examined, the department did not complete the checklist fully for 19 offenders, and for 30 offenders their probation officers had not determined the actions needed to address the reintegration needs that had been identified—and there is a whole list of reintegration needs. What happens if we do not address those needs and give support for reintegration into the community is that offenders reoffend. All the Minister at the time had to do was to look at the reoffending statistics and to ask himself what the problem was. He was being advised by the department at the time, and that is made quite clear in the Auditor-General’s report.

The report also goes on to state in another part that over the course of the development and implementation of the new community-based sentences introduced by the previous Government, that Government had introduced a policy that it had undertaken no planning for. It had made no analysis of the future impacts of that policy. That Government had not given any consideration to the effect on the department or its staff of the whole cultural shift in the way in which the processes associated with offenders and their treatment were to be managed. All of that just compounded. The Minister at the time was told that this was a serious issue and that it should not be underestimated. That was the previous Minister, Phil Goff, who is the current leader of the Labour Party. He did not listen to that advice.

Well, there has been a whole new change in the department, and I have to tell members that it is due to the excellent Minister Judith Collins. Finally, someone is sitting up, taking notice, and saying—along with the Associate Minister of Corrections, Dr Pita Sharples—that change is happening. We will not dump on the people who are already in that department. We want to get in there, show some leadership, and make a difference, and Judith Collins is making that difference. The department welcomes that change. From those on the shop floor right through to the chief executive, people welcome that change. They are welcoming the interest being shown by the Minister. There were five different Ministers of Corrections in the previous Government, which shows us that no one really cared. Well, I tell members that National cares about what is happening in the department. We will make a difference. Under the leadership provided by the Hon Judith Collins, we will make that difference. When Opposition members decide that they want to take another call to start having a go at the department, they need to think about what is happening in the corrections system, really care about what is happening there, and care about the fact that reoffending went up under their watch.

Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE (Labour—Waimakariri) Link to this

I was not going to take another call, but that was an outstanding contribution by Sandra Goudie. I just want to touch on two—

DAVID GARRETT (ACT) Link to this

I understand that this debate is supposed to be a financial review debate; it seemed to be about anything but during the speech from the previous speaker, Clayton Cosgrove.

I pay tribute to the Minister of Corrections, Judith Collins, for her willingness to look at different options in order to save the taxpayer money in this difficult time, which I understand is what this debate is meant to be about. I applaud her confirmation that we have seen the end of underfloor heating, plasma TVs, and other luxuries for prisons and prisoners.

Mahatma Gandhi once said that a civilisation or society is judged by how it treats its most vulnerable people. The members over the other side may be very surprised to hear that I applaud that statement and agree with it.

Hon JUDITH COLLINS (Minister of Corrections) Link to this

Mr Cosgrove asked some questions in his speech. He asked who is accountable. It is great to have an Opposition spokesperson who never reads his papers. If he had read them, he would have seen that the report from the State Services Commissioner says quite clearly that “The chief executive is accountable for the performance of the Department.” If only Mr Cosgrove could read!

He also made some other allegations; he alleged that when in Opposition I was the spokesperson on corrections, along with the Hon Simon Power. Actually, I was the spokesperson on welfare. I had nothing to do with the corrections area. Mr Cosgrove said that I said that heads would roll. I never made that statement, and I challenge that member to table the evidence. He is very good at making allegations and at character assassination, but he never ever fronts up with the facts because he unfortunately never reads his papers. Mr Cosgrove should do his homework before he comes to the Chamber.

I think it is extremely important that we look at the fact that this financial review is a review of the 9 failed years of a failed Labour Government. That is exactly what this financial review is. How can members of a party possibly stand up and be proud that we incarcerate more people than ever before, that at the moment 8,500 New Zealanders are prisoners in our correctional facilities, and that we have to police 40,000 community-based sentences? After 9 years how can any party be proud of that? Frankly, I think that is a shocking statistic.

I also think it is shocking that the previous Labour Government never really dealt with rehabilitation. That is why it is great to be part of a Government that has promised to double the number of rehabilitation programmes available to our prisoners. If we just continuously lock up people, and Māori in particular—which is what the previous Government did; no wonder its members never want to talk to iwi or to the Māori Party about prisons—we will end up with more and more people completely disconnected from society. We will end up with a more violent society, and more people will feel that they are not part of society and that they do not have to care about society. That is one of the most appalling tragedies of Labour’s legacy. What Phil Goff did first in justice and then in corrections, and what Annette King did in police, was all about locking people up and throwing away the key. Time and time again that was all it was about.

I am completely in favour of proper and truthful sentences that mean what they say. In 1999 Labour campaigned on tougher sentences. In Government it increased all sentences, but then it brought parole eligibility down to one-third of the sentence. That shows us how truthful those members were about sentences. They told untruths about what they would do.

Mr Cosgrove asked how the public will judge what Labour has done. I think the public has judged it—the public threw Labour out. Frankly, the public would be even more likely to throw Labour out if there was another election today. The public has had enough of Labour. It has had enough of Labour’s carping and whingeing, and it wants something positive. Do I ever hear anything from Mr Cosgrove about what positive steps we could take together to actually help prisoners get rehabilitated? Do I ever hear Mr Cosgrove saying that he has learnt about a great rehabilitation programme and he would like to share it with me? No; Mr Garrett does that but Mr Cosgrove does not, and I think that speaks volumes. It speaks volumes because this Government is committed to rehabilitation of those prisoners who will be rehabilitated—let us not kid ourselves that everybody will be rehabilitated.

I find working in corrections a great opportunity, despite all the problems it has and the fact that it is dealing with 8,500 prisoners in jail, plus all the others. It has a lot of problems, but we have to expect that because corrections staff deal with some of the worst people in New Zealand and sometimes things will go wrong. People who work in corrections are good-hearted people. They are really enjoying having direction and having a Minister who cares about them, who turns up, who goes to what they want, who gives them talks about things, and who listens to them, which is something that never happened under the previous Labour Government. Labour members never listened to people on the shop floor because they do not respect the corrections officers. They have never respected the corrections officers; they have always talked down to them. They have never listened.

I think one of the good things in corrections is that we have change.

Hon CHRIS CARTER (Labour—Te Atatū) Link to this

I rise because I care about education. Labour cares about education. In the financial period we are discussing, much of the time was actually under a Labour administration and I, of course, was privileged to be the Minister of Education; we had much to be proud about. Education funding under Labour doubled from over $5 billion to over $10 billion. We saw $3.4 billion go into school property. We saw 20 free hours for every 3 and 4-year old in this country. We saw teachers’ salaries go up by 37 percent and principals’ by 42 percent. We saw interest-free loans for students. We saw tremendous things happening in our education system. We saw an education sector that was optimistic, progressive, and innovative. We saw a new curriculum come into our primary and intermediate schools. We saw the National Certificate of Educational Achievement refined and improved, constantly. There was a sense of optimism in education.

But what has happened since the election? What has happened since National took charge of education? I have to tell members that I have continued to visit schools, as I did regularly as Minister of Education, and I am hearing a lot of fear and concern. There is a sense that things have been frozen, that things will be cut, and that resources will be reduced. There is not a sense of direction any longer.

I think of my own area of west Auckland and of two projects that were signed out last year. One of them is the Waitakere learning plan, which I understand the new Minister of Education will be meeting principals of west Auckland to discuss on 16 April. They were told last year they had $100,000 to develop this learning plan across some 93 schools. They had the money signed out and ready to go, but were then told it was frozen. We also had the Waitakere Zero Tolerance to Truancy initiative, which got a letter from the ministry stating that, yes, it had $80,000 because truancy is an important subject. We heard a lot from the present Minister of Education, Anne Tolley, when she was in Opposition, about how important it was to address truancy, and that is a really great project. The project got a letter in early November stating that it had the money, and ads were run on Flava, the most popular youth radio station in Auckland. The project now has $4,000 worth of bills, and organisers have been told that the money is frozen.

We have also been told that the kindergarten teachers collective agreement has now expired, and the ministry has not received instructions from the Minister even to begin negotiations. But we did hear in this Chamber an admission from the National Minister of Education, Mrs Tolley, that pay parity was no longer a given. That is incredibly alarming.

ALLAN PEACHEY (National—Tāmaki) Link to this

Was that speech we have just heard from the previous Minister of Education, Chris Carter, a contribution to a parliamentary debate or a eulogy for a failed Government? For the entire 5 minutes—

Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) Link to this

I rise to speak about tertiary education, in particular, because it is an area that I feel really strongly about. I am concerned at the lack of grip the Minister of Education seems to have on this part of the education portfolio. Tertiary education will be the vehicle by which we recover rapidly from a recession. More than any other single component in the New Zealand economy, this will be the vehicle by which we upskill the labour market, existing and future, and prepare the labour force of the future to participate, in order to assist the economy to recover from recession.

I want to raise a couple of points of concern about tertiary education. Given that it is part of my professional background, along with others in this Chamber, I have a particular attachment to the tertiary education provided through the universities, as well as that provided through polytechs, private training establishments, independent tertiary institutions, and the industry training organisations in their capacity as a link between skills in the workplace and the training that is required to provide those skills into the economy. As part of that concern, I have a concern for the students who participate in tertiary education and who are represented by a nationwide students association. Those students have been trying for many weeks—in fact, for 4 months—to get an appointment with the Minister to talk about issues that relate to tertiary students and their prospects, as well as the current hardships that they are experiencing, largely because of a decline in the number of jobs in the labour market.

In an article that has gone far and wide across a number of student newspapers, students said on Monday, 16 March: “Tertiary Education Minister Anne Tolley last week wasted $400 of student money when she failed to keep an appointment with national tertiary student representatives.” The article further stated: “NZUSA had sought a meeting with Tolley since she was appointed, and even invited her to address their January conference, but ‘it’s taken her four months to get back to us’.” Students then embarked, in this article, on what they called “The Great Tolley Hunt II: The Sound of Silence”. It has been very difficult for the students to connect with the Minister for Tertiary Education, but finally they did. Students have made that information available in subsequent university student publications, notably Salient on Monday, 30 March, where students said “Success in the Great Tolley Hunt”. The article stated: “The Great Tolley Hunt has finally achieved some success thanks to Jackson Wood, editor of Salient. Salient managed to do what all of us in student media thought impossible, and get Tertiary Education Minister Anne Tolley to respond—sorta—to some questions.”

The article then goes on to say that “National’s policies concerning tertiary education have done little to prove that Tolley understands the complexities of the university system.” Certainly, it is a complex system. I do not dispute that for a moment, but axing jobs from the Tertiary Education Commission is not the way to get a handle on the tertiary education portfolio. It is not the way to get a handle on the complexities of what is a very complex portfolio. It is very clear that money is of no consequence to this Minister. Obviously, $400 means a lot to the New Zealand University Students Association. I wonder whether $1,800 to run a helicopter from Auckland International Airport across the expanding empire of the Auckland University of Technology, or whatever it was that she was viewing, with the helicopter going into the central business district and down to Mechanics Bay, was also a worthwhile use of public money.

RAHUI KATENE (Māori Party—Te Tai Tonga) Link to this

Less than 2 months ago, the latest education report to hit the news gave rise to two shocking but unsurprising facts. The first was that nearly 40 percent of Māori students left school before turning 17, a whole 10 percentage points more than the national average. The second was that most Māori students—56 percent—leave school before completing the second level of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement, compared with 34 per cent of all learners. That is a gap of 22 percentage points. Those facts are shocking because they reflect high levels of disengagement and a subsequent impact of low achievement, and unsurprising because, well, tell us something new.

Ngā Haeata Mātauranga , the annual report on Māori education of 2007-08, puts into print ideas that should be well known to all members of this House by showing a level of systemic dysfunction that no one can ignore. Yet, when we turn to the 2007-08 financial review of the Ministry of Education, it appears that the dysfunction continues. Ngā Haeata Mātauranga revealed that Māori learners are three times more likely to be stood down, suspended, excluded, or expelled than their Pākehā peers, and are a massive four times more likely to be frequent truants.

The section on truancy in this financial review then tells us “the most recent attendance survey undertaken was in 2006—a survey had been planned for 2008 but was not carried out as deficiencies that had affected the 2006 survey had not yet been addressed.” That is shocking. There were 2 whole years to address the deficiencies and the small matter of whether we are talking about 30,000 or 3,000 children missing from school. Is that not something that the Ministry of Education would want to get right? All studies show consistently that students who are truant not only miss out on school work and have their educational achievement affected but also run the increased risk of becoming alienated from the educational system and of dropping out of school.

In the ministry’s own research, officials point to data from the Smithfield project, which revealed that student attendance during year 11 was one of the most significant variables affecting student achievement in senior school. If that is not bad enough, longitudinal studies of Christchurch and Dunedin children from my electorate of Te Tai Tonga produced evidence that truancy was a strong predictor of violence later in life, and predictive of delinquency, substance abuse, suicidal risk, and unemployment.

The Ministry of Education’s performance on truancy fails to provide me with the confidence that it is truly committed to addressing the measures of participation such as retention, early leaving exemptions, suspensions, expulsions, exclusions, and truancy. We in the Māori Party really want to see that happening today. However, one bright moment in the 2007-08 review of the ministry was the brief section on Te Kōtahitanga. The Education and Science Committee described this project as being aimed at addressing under-achievement in Māori students in mainstream schools. I would, however, like to point out the obvious: although under-achievement—and for that matter, truancy rates—reports on the performance and situation of individual students, the failure we are observing is a failure of the education sector to succeed in actively engaging all of its learners. Without engagement, achievement will not follow.

We must do better as a nation to confront the poor performance of schools in engaging and retaining Māori students. Te Kōtahitanga is one of the projects that we hope will make the difference—and we know the influence of the Hon Pita Sharples as an Associate Minister of Education will be particularly important in revitalising the focus on Māori achievement. And a critical part of making the difference is in the quality of staff that we have to actively engage with whānau, hapū, and iwi in the improvement of outcomes for Māori students.

Last Friday I had a fantastic morning with the Māori students at Aranui High School in Christchurch, which showed me that our young people succeed when the programmes are tailored to their needs, and when it actually matters to the school that the learning is both meaningful and relevant.

CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) Link to this

Tēnā koe, Mr Chairperson. Tēnā koutou katoa. This is my first opportunity to reflect on the Ministry of Education and the Education and Science Committee’s reporting experience. As a very new member of a select committee, I have been fascinated by the ritual of accountability that we call financial reviews. Very well-dressed and understandably defensive officials present us with glossy reports. In between the outcomes and outputs—blah-blah-blah—there are issues of the wise use of resources, but I am not sure whether we get close to that conversation.

What really matters to the Green Party are the questions behind the financial reviews. Such questions are to the Minister and they ask who benefits and what is changing. It is nearly 20 years since Tomorrow’s Schools was foisted on to an unsuspecting public, under the guise of greater parental involvement, and soon it will be time to acknowledge that this particular emperor is damn near naked.

We now have a system where half the class in any given State high school goes to Paris for its school trip, while the other half is lucky if it gets to go to McDonald’s. As Professor John O’Neill of Massey University recently said in his speech to the Quality Public Education Coalition: “Agreeing to use money”—which he is referring to in terms of monetarist values—“in schooling as we have done since 1989 destroys the idea of education as a public good, where benefits are owned and shared equally by everyone. Introducing money creates the idea of education as, principally, a private good, the aim of which is to create personal wealth through the buying and selling of educational commodities or services. This is commerce, not education.”

I know that some people in the House think that everything is commerce, and that the creeping privatisation of the education system is a logical manifestation of the sacred concept of choice. The strange thing is that poor whānau and families do not get choices, because they cannot afford them. To quote Professor O’Neill, does the Minister accept “that children of rich families are deserving of a better education than those of poor families”? The marginalised young need more than a trip to McDonald’s; they need an equitable education system that values them, instead of obsessively measuring them. They also need healthy basics in schooling, starting with food. The Green Party was appalled to discover the Minister did not seek any advice or gather any evidence from either the Ministry of Health or the Ministry of Education, before she ditched the school food and beverage guidelines.

Teachers, as reflective practitioners, already know who needs help; they just do not have the time and resources to give it. The whole special-needs funding formula debacle is a case study in inequity, as is the resourcing of early childhood education.

Professor John Hattie is right in saying that the quality of relationships is the key to learning. Those who simplify his work and say that smaller classes are not needed probably have not experienced the difference between 30 wired 13-year-olds bouncing off the walls, and 18 students with whom it might be possible to create a cooperative learning environment. Size does count, in education at least. That is why the private schools put class size in all of their brochures. We do not need to change class size everywhere, but we need to put State resources where the need is greatest.

We might also like to start preparing our children for a different economy based on the reality of a finite world, and a profound need for cooperation and non-violence. We need to teach them that we are fundamentally connected to the earth, and what that relationship means. There is a whole economy to rebuild based on those principles.

Last week I asked some young people who had been expelled or who had walked out of school what they needed, and it sure was not a $3,000 fine to their whānau. They said they needed no racism from teachers or from each other, safety and respect, and practical and relevant learning. If we want them to respond to us, then we in this Parliament have to model these values. That is what I want to talk to the Minister about—not just the numbers. From the helicopter it is difficult for her to see the damage to the public school system, but she will eventually have to come back down to earth. My fear is that when she does, she will just bail out the private schools, and ignore the real education funding issues. Kia ora tātou.

SUE MORONEY (Labour) Link to this

Financial reviews are fascinating processes, because they require the select committee to take a helicopter view of what is going on in that particular portfolio. I need to inform the Minister in the chair, Anne Tolley, that when one is invited to take a helicopter view of the sector, or advised that that would be a good idea, it is not an invitation to hop in a helicopter and fly over buildings in order to look at them from the top; it is actually an invitation to look at the big picture and take a broad-brush view of what is happening in the sector. It is not an invitation for the Minister to take a helicopter ride.

When one takes a proper helicopter view of the education sector, it is difficult to take that helicopter view without realising the absolute importance of the early childhood education sector in the whole education process. I want to focus on that point because, under Labour, huge momentum was gained in the early childhood education sector. It came from being a very low-status sector to being one that was very highly valued by a Labour Government, because Labour understood the importance of getting it right from an early age. We understood that if we invested in quality educational services very early on in people’s lives we would get better outcomes, with, in fact, fewer resources, as those people aged.

The importance of the early childhood education sector gained hugely in status under the previous Labour Government. The 20 free hours policy that Labour put forward increased participation in early childhood education. In fact, we heard in the financial review that the increase in participation was so high that it was larger than what the Ministry of Education had budgeted for. It had budgeted for a smaller number of 3 and 4-year-old children taking up the 20 free hours’ early childhood education. I know that was really disappointing for the incoming Government, because National had campaigned long and hard to try to make sure that, first of all, providers did not buy into the 20 free hours concept, and then it tried to convince families that they did not need it. So I know that National was very disappointed about the high uptake and the subsequent increase in participation in quality early childhood education for 3 and 4-year-olds. However, despite National’s best efforts, not only was it a success but also it was a raging success, so much so that it outstripped the budget that the ministry had put aside in the financial year we are reviewing.

But there was not only the 20 free hours policy, there was also Labour’s policy to ensure that all staff in the early childhood sector would be qualified and registered teachers by the year 2012. That policy seems to have gone out the window. Pay parity also made a big difference in this sector, because it acknowledged for the very first time in our history that the pay for teaching should not depend on the age of the child being taught. In fact, some would argue that because it is so important that we get it right very early on, we should be valuing more highly our early childhood education teachers.

Under Labour this sector became very used to being highly engaged with Government planning. But no longer. Under the new Government, the sector is completely unsure of the direction of the new Government in this regard, because the sector has had no signs, there has been no discussion, and it has had no involvement in the future direction. I even found this in the Minister’s own electorate. It would not be that hard to go down the road and engage with the early childhood education providers in Gisborne, but the Minister does not appear to have done even that.

What has happened under the new Government? The first thing is that the funding for the nine new early childhood education centres in South Auckland that had been put aside by Labour has been put on hold by this Government. The Minister said she wants to increase participation in early childhood education, and the first thing she did was to put on hold nine new centres for South Auckland, the very area that is most in need in regard to increasing participation in early childhood education.

What is another action that the Minister has taken? She has completely scrapped the improved staff ratios that were due to come into being on 1 July for children aged over 2. On 1 July this year improved staff ratios were on their way, but the incoming Government has scrapped them. We questioned the ministry about the importance of having improved staff ratios in quality early childhood education. It said that there is no doubt that there is a very strong link between the quality of the education and the number of staff per child.

COLIN KING (National—Kaikōura) Link to this

When we compare the previous Minister of Education with the current one, we see that today the National Government can be very confident that we have more character and get up and go in our Minister of Education, the Hon Anne Tolley, in the sense that she is going to make a difference. We are very pleased to see that.

Let us have a look at the failed 9 years of the Labour Government, when looking at the 2007-08 financial review of education. Education is recognised as the very foundation on which we build the opportunity and inspiration of a generation. When we look at the outcomes from that failed Government, we see that one in five of our children is totally inadequate when it comes to being able to cope, read, write, and do maths. What an absolute failure! The Hon Anne Tolley talks about parental involvement in education and being able to get a school report that is understandable, so that parents can be engaged in education. But we hear the previous Minister of Education, the Hon Chris Carter, saying that teachers are fearful. I think we are seeing light at the end of the tunnel, and we will see education growing and going onward and upward.

Let us consider just for a few moments some of the debacles that occurred under Labour. Labour destroyed the technology teachers curriculum. The Correspondence School has been wrecked; it is no longer the iconic school that it used to be. What is happening to the agricultural curriculum in our secondary schools today? It has been totally wrecked and has been undermined.

When it comes to truancy, again, Labour attempted to sweep it under the table, to ignore it all together. It is very, very disappointing to see that. We are now at a stage where we can do some improvements and look forward to some real achievement. Labour’s attempts were quite knee-jerk at the very end. When there were far too many early exemptions, what did the Minister do? He just shut them down immediately, without any consideration of what could happen. From that point of view, a perverse effect was created.

It was very exciting to go to schools in South Auckland, like the decile 1 Southern Cross Campus, which needed the opportunity to have hands-on learning. What did we see occurring under the previous Labour Government? That Government totally ignored the needs of the people in South Auckland. It was very, very obvious to those people who had stood back and heard the rhetoric and the nonsense from the previous Government that that particular school was crying out for help. When we looked for its technology provision we found that it did not exist. It was an absolute failure. That is an indictment on the Labour Party member who represented that electorate.

When we look through the education cycle over the last 9 years, and, particularly, at the period of the financial review, we see that Labour was strong on rhetoric. It was a very command-and-control environment. National has brought inspiration and opportunity to the table. It is about engaging in learning in a multitude of ways, in a partnership between teachers, parents, and children, so that we get some go-forward.

One thing that really did disturb the Education and Science Committee during the financial review was the ongoing consideration of, yet lack of substance around, teacher training. We found that teachers were coming out from their teacher-training institutions and going into schools without even being able to operate assessment tools such as asTTle. That kind of assessment is very, very important. If a teacher cannot clearly tell parents where their children are sitting in the education system, we are failing that generation of children.

It was a breath of fresh air when the Hon Anne Tolley announced that those schools that are performing very, very well will have relief from the Education Review Office reports. I think that is a wonderful breath of fresh air. It allows the attention to be focused on those schools that need to be uplifted and inspired. I think that certainly is the way to go.

Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister of Education) Link to this

It certainly is an odd feeling to be standing in this House, as the Minister of Education, during a financial review covering a year over which I had no control whatsoever. In fact, I may not even agree with some of the things that were done, as they were done by the previous Government.

If I have to use one phrase to sum up the Government that was responsible for this financial review 2007-08, I would say it was “promise and hope”. That is what the previous Labour Government was very good at, especially in education. It made lots of promises, hoped they would work, and hoped the money would be there when the time came to implement them. The reality is that the money is not there, and lots of promises were made for which no dollars were put up. One of the schools concerned was in Upper Hutt, and I am looking at the local member over there, but we will come to that.

Let me talk through just some of the issues that have been raised in the House today. Early childhood education is a classic. The previous Government went out to South Auckland, said it would build nine centres, and named nine schools. One of those schools was a high school and one was an intermediate school. They are not very interested in having—

Dr KENNEDY GRAHAM (Green) Link to this

I speak to page 4 of the financial review of the Justice and Electoral Committee on the Crown Law Office, and address one issue that was explored—namely, the application of universal jurisdiction for war crimes. During the select committee’s review the Solicitor-General, Dr David Collins, provided an explanation of New Zealand’s approach to a person who may be in this country and who is suspected of having committed a war crime elsewhere. I appreciate the constructive response of the Solicitor-General to the questions that were put to him, and the material that he subsequently supplied. Under the Geneva Conventions Act 1958 and the International Crimes and International Criminal Court Act 2000 New Zealand has established universal jurisdiction for the prosecution of anyone in that position, the stated objective being to end impunity for perpetrators of serious international crimes. Yet in the only case to date where the issue has arisen, we may have faltered at the first hurdle.

When a former Israeli Chief of Defence Force was issued with an arrest warrant by a District Court during his visit to New Zealand, the then Attorney-General stayed the proceedings the very next day. His decision rested on advice from the Solicitor-General that the evidence “could not be relied upon to show a prima facie case”. I hesitate to pronounce on that judgement by Mr Collins, whom I hold in high regard, but I note four points.

First, the Israeli Government had acknowledged to the United Nations Security Council that 14 civilians had been killed in an air attack for a targeted assassination in Gaza, and the suspect had publicly admitted a decision-making role. Israel claimed self defence as legal justification, yet council members, including the US, condemned the attack as being heavy-handed action. Israel knew that at least one civilian was with the targeted militia leader, and that others might be in the vicinity. The action, it appears, constituted incidental loss of life disproportionate and excessive to any anticipated military advantage, and thus there was a prima facie case for a war crime. Second, under the 1958 Act, the Attorney-General’s obligation is not simply to pronounce on the substance of evidence that a New Zealand resident may have supplied and that a judge may have decided upon, but, rather, to search for suspected persons and bring them before our courts. Third, although the consent of the Attorney-General is required before an information can be laid under the 1958 Act, that is not the case under the 2000 Act. Fourth, New Zealand cannot engage in self-absolution from such a criminal prosecution on the grounds that the International Criminal Court was not active on the matter, because the primary responsibility, under the principle of complementarity, rests with national courts. For these reasons, and having consulted extensively with legal scholars, I come to the unavoidable conclusion that New Zealand failed its international obligations on this matter.

That is history. I now address the current Attorney-General, Christopher Finlayson, who is held in high esteem throughout this country, with the following points to ensure that we meet our responsibilities in the future—for these kinds of issues are certain to recur. I ask whether he can confirm the following: first, that an information may be laid and an arrest warrant issued under the International Crimes and International Criminal Court Act 2000 without his consent; second, that, independent of the evidential merit of such an information, the Government has an obligation under the Geneva Conventions Act 1958 to search for suspected persons and bring them before the courts of this country; and, third, that in deciding upon consent for prosecution, his judgment of the national interest and the public interest will faithfully reflect the legitimate claim of any New Zealand resident in ensuring natural justice over suspected war crimes committed anywhere, over and above any political interest in our bilateral relations with any other country. Thank you.

Hon CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON (Attorney-General) Link to this

I thank the honourable member Kennedy Graham for raising those questions, and for having given me advance notice of them, because they are important questions and are worthy of consideration.

The first question is answered thus: under section 13 of the International Crimes and International Criminal Court Act 2000 the consent of the Attorney-General is required before any proceeding for an offence under sections 9 to 11 of that Act can be instituted. As with all prosecutions requiring prior consent, a person may be arrested on warrant before an information is laid, but no information may actually be laid. In relation to the issue concerning the Israeli officer, an information had been placed before the District Court, and a warrant to arrest was issued on that information. That, in fact, made the proceeding a nullity because there was no jurisdiction to issue the warrant on the information, and there was no evidential basis to arrest, either.

The second question the honourable member raised asked whether the Government had an obligation, independent of the evidential merit of the information, to search for suspected persons. If there is reliable information that a war crimes suspect is in a particular jurisdiction—say, this country—then the State party has an obligation to locate that suspect. I understand that New Zealand did exactly that a decade or so ago in relation to a possible World War II genocide suspect. But the key point is that the Government can take no formal step without evidence of a standard necessary to arrest and detain. That principle applies whether or not the trial would be in New Zealand and whether or not the suspect would be extradited. The principle or obligation had no application to the Ya’alon case; the Government knew where the general was but until the evidence was sound it had no possible authority to detain him. My understanding is that whatever the relevant international obligation, the obligation to search for war crimes suspects is subject to the usual safeguards in our criminal procedure. The material supporting the criminal allegations in the case the member has raised was essentially an information pack that had been emailed from a source in London and that contained no admissible evidence. So if the person concerned had been arrested, there probably would have been an application to the court for habeas corpus, and I imagine that it would have been granted.

The third question the honourable member raised was about what steps the Attorney-General must take in determining whether the prosecution is to proceed, and whether his judgment of the national interest will faithfully reflect the legitimate claim of any New Zealand resident in ensuring natural justice over suspected war crimes committed elsewhere, over and above any political interest in our bilateral relations with any country. I agree that that is a very important question. The issue of national interest in relation to a criminal action is always a matter for the Attorney-General in Cabinet, acting as the senior law officer. The nature of the relevant national interest will differ from case to case, so no particular assurances could be given to the member as to the weight to be given to particular values. That approach was recently endorsed by the House of Lords in a decision about the BAE Systems bribery scandal—the member may well be aware of it—involving Saudi Arabia and The Corner House litigation, where the Director of the Serious Fraud Office took steps in relation to a prosecution.

I hope those answers satisfy the member. The matters are of great moment. I am grateful to the member for giving me the opportunity to at least reflect upon some of those questions, and I would be happy to take the matter up privately with him at any time.

METIRIA TUREI (Green) Link to this

I want to address two issues in the financial review. The first is the Community Conservation Fund and the second concerns biodiversity protection. The Community Conservation Fund, which was discussed at the financial review, is a Green Party Budget initiative from the 2008 Budget. I am very pleased with the success of that conservation fund. In fact, just last week the Department of Conservation announced the first round of successful funding applications whereby a million dollars was distributed to a large number—nearly 30, I think—of community organisations, rūnanga, and other organisations doing conservation work on public land. This fund is designed to support the work that is being done on public land, such as dune lands, wetlands, and other areas that traditionally miss out on funding. It helps to build relationships between local communities, councils, and iwi. I note two particular projects: the Tomahawk Smaills Dune Restoration project in my area in Dunedin, and the Hokonui rūnanga, who received funding to do restoration work on the banks of the Mataura River—one of the most polluted rivers in the south of the South Island, due to the high industrial pollution that goes into that river. I congratulate all of those who received funding from their applications and encourage all those who did not to apply again to the Department of Conservation, because further rounds will be distributed.

The second issue is around biodiversity protection, which was mentioned in the review, and I note that today the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment has released the report Change in the high country: Environmental stewardship and tenure review. This is a very serious report and it highlights a great deal of the concerns that the Green Party has expressed about the tenure review process and its failure to protect biodiversity values of the South Island high country. The South Island high country is public land, it is owned by the Crown, there are long-term leases for that land distributed to farming families for the purposes of farming that land, and tenure review is the process for dividing that land between leaseholders for productive use and the retention of land of high biodiversity value in public hands for public use.

The biodiversity land of much of the South Island high country is absolutely huge, but it is also hugely threatened. It is not that the public would necessarily know that, because the commissioner has reported that the 2008 Government audit of the tenure review process did not mention any of the adverse effects of tenure review, and only highlighted where there was an advantage. But in fact we know that for every 6 hectares of high-value conservation land in the high country, only 1 hectare is protected by the tenure review process. I say again that only 1 of every 6 hectares of the most highly valuable conservation biodiversity land in the South Island high country is protected by the tenure review process. Tenure review is failing to protect the biodiversity values of the South Island high country, and, as a result, New Zealanders are losing their most valuable biodiversity in the high country, because the tenure review process favours privatisation of public land.

The impact of this privatisation on water quality is extremely serious, and that was also noted by the commissioner in the report. The report identifies the serious risk that farming practices have for water quality, even those in the high country, which are often different kinds of farming practices than one might find elsewhere. None the less there is significant intensification of those areas of land that are privatised. The report states that the continued intensification of privatised leases will inevitably result in “significant adverse impacts on adjacent water quality”, contrary to the primary objective of the Crown Pastoral Land Act, which is to promote ecologically sustainable land management.

The tenure review process is failing our country. It is failing to protect the water quality of those very important areas and it is creating a serious risk to biodiversity protection and water quality. The commissioner’s report also notes that it is threatened by the weakening of the Resource Management Act by National. As we know, the National Government is engaged in the process of weakening the Resource Management Act to make it more difficult for New Zealanders to be involved in ecological protection. That is a disgraceful position for this Government to take.

Hon TIM GROSER (Minister of Conservation) Link to this

It is a great privilege to be involved with the Department of Conservation—I say “Conservation” because the speaking order has me listed down as the “Minister for Conversation”.

Hon DARREN HUGHES (Labour) Link to this

It is a pleasure to speak to the financial review of the Ministry of Transport, and to follow on from the self-described “Minister of Conversation”, the Hon Tim Groser. When I was listening to him speak about the Department of Conservation, I found it hard to believe that he had delegated the entire thing to the Hon Kate Wilkinson. He seemed to be so keen on it—but there we are; that is not what the schedule of delegations revealed last week.

The period under review by the Committee of the whole House was a quite exciting period for the transport portfolio. Quite a lot of important decisions were made, and there was vision and a strategic view about where the New Zealand transport sector could be heading. When we compare that period with the one we find ourselves in today, we can see what a good period that was for New Zealand. Some true decisions were made across a whole range of issues that matter to the people, the businesses, and the community and social organisations in this country. That is the period that the Committee finds itself looking at. It seems that many of those very fine decisions and the direction we were heading in have been abandoned in the current period, and the Committee should be asking the Government to account for that.

DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East) Link to this

After that speech from the Labour member Darren Hughes, we need to get some facts straight. It is simply rubbish that National is planning to cut out public transport.

Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister of Transport) Link to this

It is a pleasure to speak on the transport portfolio this evening. I first congratulate the Opposition spokesperson on transport, Darren Hughes, on his fantastic haircut. It is very impressive. I recommend something a little more utilitarian; perhaps something like Mr Bennett’s might be more in keeping.

We are, of course, referring to the 2007-08 year, and I think the trouble with the previous Labour Government is that a lot of the stuff it talked about was puffery, if I may say so—puffery. There were so many things—there were so many strategies within strategies and reviews within reviews—that we ended up with a lot of very impressive bits of paper and not a lot to show for it. By way of an exhibit, because we are referring to the 2007-08 year, I refer to Sea Change: Transforming Coastal Shipping in New Zealand, which I think is a fine document in that I obviously support coastal freight and freighting generally. This particular document is 36 pages in duration. Over the dinner break I took the liberty of working out that there are 14 full pages of photos in this 36-page document. There are four pages of maps and the equivalent of seven pages of white space. So of the whole 36-page strategy document that the previous Government oversaw, 25 pages are what one might generously call illustrations.

I think that was, a little bit, the story of the previous Government’s approach to transport. The honourable member opposite, Darren Hughes, mentioned an approach to road safety. He was, I thought, quite negative about the new Government’s approach to road safety. One of the big things we need to do is improve the quality of our highways. I refer to one that was in his former electorate of Ōtaki, which is the road from Foxton to Paremata. There were 81 fatalities on that highway over the last 10 years, and 256 serious injuries. We can tackle that in many ways, but one of the ways we have to do it is to improve the quality of the State highway infrastructure. I make absolutely no apology for taking that approach.

I draw attention also to the actual growth figures in the National Land Transport Programme going forward, because those are the ones that have been criticised so much by the Opposition. There are some interesting numbers. The actual allocation for walking and cycling facilities is up 42 percent for the next 3 years over the allocation for the last 3 years—a 42 percent increase. I freely acknowledge that that is not quite as much as it would have been under the previous Labour Government, but it still remains a 42 percent increase. It is not a cut. Renewal of State highways is up 12 percent, maintenance and operation of State highways is up 16 percent, renewal of local roads is up 19 percent, and maintenance and operation of local roads is up 16 percent.

Road policing is a very interesting one that is often talked about. The allocation for road policing in this country 2 years ago was $232 million. This year it is $273 million—it has gone up $40 million over 2 years, and I salute the party opposite for actually bringing that forward. We have said that that is a lot of growth in 2 years. We are now taking it to $291 million, then to $300 million, and then on to $309 million, yet the member opposite stands up and says during his 5 minutes that we are cutting road policing. We are not cutting road policing; we are growing it.

More important, we are also committing to public transport. The commitment to public transport is huge over the next 3 years. Public transport services are going up from $484 million—forget what Opposition members say, this is what they actually did over the last 3 years—to $633 million over the next 3 years, which is a 30 percent increase over 3 years.

Hon DARREN HUGHES (Labour) Link to this

It is a great privilege to follow the Minister of Transport, Steven Joyce. I appreciated his flattery. The problem at the moment is not that I have had a haircut but that I need one, and I have also completely run out of hair product; the Minister has probably never found himself in that scenario.

We cannot quite see eye to eye on that issue, nor can we see eye to eye on his commitment to public transport. Steven Joyce just stood in the Chamber and said that he was increasing the amount of money available for public transport service; he said that he was increasing it to $633 million. But according to the previous Labour Government’s policy statement for the 3 years we are heading into, the funding was meant to be $666 million, which is probably quite a good figure for the Minister’s more sinister political motivations. That is a cut of $33 million out of public transport at a time when Governments all over the world are looking to public transport not only to try to make a difference in their economies but also to move more people by public transport. This Government will spend less on public transport and on alternatives to roads than the previous Labour Government had projected, funded, and budgeted for. What other country in the world is doing that?

Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister of Transport) Link to this

There are a few things we cannot let pass completely there. Firstly, the previous Labour Government’s commitment to the Waterview Connection project did not involve any money. That is the unfortunate part of it. There was no money involved in it, at all. It was a commitment to the extent that those members liked the idea, and they also called for a report on the business case for that particular road.