2. PESETA SAM LOTU-IIGA (National—Maungakiekie) Link to this
to the Minister of Finance
How will Budget 2010 ensure taxpayers’ money is spent responsibly?
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Minister of Finance) Link to this
Budget 2010 will continue the process of cleaning up the mess left by the previous Government and improving the quality of Government spending. It is important that this Government focus on better front-line services and on not wasting money on bureaucracy, strategies, plans, and workshops, as the previous Government did. This Government intends to honour the confidence that taxpayers have shown in the Government’s ability to use their PAYE dollar wisely.
It will not actually be very difficult to do so, because in the past 5 years under the previous Government one-third of all Budget vote areas received funding increases of over 50 percent, and two-thirds received increases of over 30 percent. These very large increases made very little increase in the effectiveness of public services. In Budget 2009 we directed about $2 billion of lower-value spending to the front line of public services, and we intend to redirect a significant amount in this next Budget.
Stuart NashWhat is his response to the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who earlier this week talked about the consequences of not doing enough to protect jobs in a recession, saying: “Look at the unemployment rate in New Zealand, just across the Tasman … If that unemployment rate was replicated here in Australia, hundreds of thousands of people would not be with jobs today,”?
That question is a bit rich coming from a party that opposes mining, which has been the largest source of new jobs in Australia.
Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga Link to this
Has the Minister seen any reports on alternative approaches to fiscal management?
Yes. I have seen reports of the long list of unfunded commitments Labour left behind when it left Government. When we add them all up, we see that the previous Labour Government had made $6 billion of commitments for which there was no funding at all. I am pleased to say that in last year’s Budget we got rid of most of those commitments, and in this year’s Budget we will continue to eliminate the waste that Labour built into the system.
When he said yesterday that jobs lost in the recession were “not real jobs”, which aspect of the jobs was not real—the steady wage, or people’s ability to pay the bills and support their families? Does he simply believe that those 168,000 people are not really unemployed?
What I said yesterday was that instead of crying crocodile tears, Labour should take responsibility for the problems it has created in the economy. It promoted a housing bubble, it fed consumption in the economy with excessive Government spending, and people who thought they had long-term, sustainable jobs did not actually have long-term, sustainable jobs. We are trying to clean up that mess.