PARLIAMENTARY REPORT
NEW ZEALAND
PROMINENT MAORI MP PASSES AWAY AT THE AGE OF 62
On 16 May 2013 the Minister of Finance, Hon. Bill English, MP, delivered his fifth Budget, saying “the fiscal outlook has improved markedly as a result of the government’s sound management ”. He added that the Budget showed that “the government is on track to meet its two key fiscal targets…to get back to surplus by 2014/15… [and] to reduce government debt to 20 per cent of GDP by 2020”. Budget 2013 was “about building momentum in [the government’s] programme”.
In addition to new initiatives
such as a “$100 million-a-year internationally focused growth package”, Mr English said “proceeds from the government’s share offer programme… are being placed in the Future Investment Fund, and will be used to pay for new public assets”. The Budget included “an additional $2.1 billion of operating and capital spending to further support the rebuilding of our second-biggest city [Christchurch]”.
Moving an amendment
expressing no confidence in the government the Leader of the Opposition, Mr David Shearer, MP, said: “This government is mired in broken promises. Budget after Budget, its promises simply have not stacked up. In 2010 John Key promised a step change with 170,000 jobs, but since the last election the National Government has come up with only 8,000. In 2011 it promised unemployment would be at 4.8 per cent; it is at 6.2
220 | The Parliamentarian | 2013: Issue Three Hon. Bill English, MP
per cent. For three years we have been promised wages would grow by about four per cent. Last year it was 1.7 per cent, and nearly half of Kiwis got no wage increase at all. Every year National promises a brighter future, and every year New Zealanders are let down.” The Prime Minister, Rt Hon.
John Key, MP, countered by asking “what does Budget 2013 tell us? It tells us that this government and this country will be back in surplus by 2014- 15”. He contrasted this with the outlook in 2008: “We came in and inherited basically a decade of mismanagement….when economists were saying the unemployment rate would rise to 10 per cent or maybe 11 per cent. And all of that happened before the Christchurch earthquakes, which we now know cost the economy north of $40 billion overall. That was before there were droughts, before there were floods, and before there was a recession….”
Dr Russell Norman, MP,
(Co-Leader, Green), said: “The three key challenges facing the New Zealand economy are how to deal with the growing current account deficit, how to deal with the growing environmental deficit, and how to deal with the growing social deficit. This Budget makes all three deficits worse.” “Only in an Orwellian world would the party that did everything to undermine the government’s accounts get any credit for any potential return to surplus.” The Leader of New Zealand
First, Rt Hon. Winston Peters, MP, said the economy had grown “by somewhere between two and three percent. Much of that is from the Christchurch rebuild”. He asked “why, since the
2008 era…have more than 200,000 mainly young New Zealanders left New Zealand? What has happened to the export-led growth promised in the ‘rebalanced economy’? As for export-led growth, well, the difference between our income from exports against our payments for imports and interest payments is a giant, black $10 billion hole, unparalleled in any other First World economy”. “Our growth is amongst the best in the OECD, unemployment is falling, real wages are rising, inflation is subdued, interest rates are the lowest in decades, and the government books will be returning to surplus in 2014 and 2015 as we promised,” said Mr Paul Goldsmith, MP, (National). Mr David Clark, MP, (Labour) said: “Labour grows the economy
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