Speech: Hide - Jobs - Not Borrow and Hope
act-new-zealand
Sun Mar 13 2011 13:00:00 GMT+1300 (New Zealand Daylight Time)
Speech: Hide - Jobs - Not Borrow and Hope
Sunday, 13 March 2011, 12:12 pm
Speech: ACT New Zealand
Jobs - Not Borrow and Hope
ACT Leader Rodney Hide Speech To ACT 2011 Annual Conference; Barrycourt Hotel & Conference Centre, Parnell, Auckland; March 13 2011.
On Friday 2:46 pm local time the people of Japan were hit with a mighty earthquake and tsunami.
Our thoughts and our prayers are with Japan. We give our heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of the lost, the missing and the broken.
We especially grieve with Japan because of our own recent tragedies. We will always remember too the tremendous help, the support and the comfort the people of Japan provided us in our time of great need.
Please stand and join with me for a minute’s silence on this New Zealand Sunday to focus our thoughts and our prayers for the people of Japan.
Thank you.
Mr President, welcome; welcome to all delegates. I would especially like to welcome former Party President Michael Crozier and to acknowledge the
terrific work Michael has done for the Party over many years.
Delegates, now is not the time to mince words.
New Zealand is facing the toughest of times. Make no mistake, we are on the brink.
The recovery from the global financial crisis is tentative, both here and in the rest of the world.
The upheavals in the middle-east and north-Africa are creating yet another global oil shock.
And now Japan has taken a terrific hit.
Our Government is borrowing $300 million a week just to get by. It’s broke.
And our second largest city has been devastated.
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The cost of the Christchurch earthquake is estimated at 10 percent of our GDP.
Other countries have suffered major earthquakes and disasters. But they were much, much bigger economies.
The cost of the 1995 Kobe earthquake represented around 2 percent of Japanese GDP. The cost of Hurricane Katrina was 1.2 percent of US GDP. The cost of the recent Queensland floods is about 0.7 percent of Australian GDP.
The cost of the Christchurch earthquake at 10 percent of GDP is a massive blow to the New Zealand economy.
Those European countries facing the biggest strife are those with the highest current account deficits, the highest overseas debt levels, the highest government debt levels.
Until recently we at least had modest government debt levels, but that last remaining prop is gone.
We no longer have the option of borrow and hope.
That the Labour Party have no thought other than to spend more, borrow more, and hope more, is both laughable and tragic. Labour has a long way to go before they are fit to govern again.
And National is too timid. The Government has stopped some of the rot.
But that is not remotely and not nearly enough.
We have to fix and rebuild Christchurch.
We can’t do that unless we fix New Zealand.
We must build a strong economy to have the investment and business confidence needed to rebuild Christchurch.
We don’t build a strong economy by making big government even bigger. Quite the reverse.
It’s going to take business and private investment to get Christchurch back on its feet. Government’s job is to provide the leadership, the necessary infrastructure, and an environment conducive to business and investment.
Christchurch can’t succeed as a government town. For a bright future we need to ensure it’s a city of successful business and enterprise.
So, we have big choices ahead for this country, big tests of our resolve.
We kiwis now face a real test of our attitude, our resolve, our determination
We need a steely focus on jobs and the economy.
We can’t afford to be knocked off course by political indulgences. That’s why Hilary’s speech on One Law for All is so important.
If Christchurch has taught us anything it is that we are one people.
The racist and separatist policies that National and the Maori Party have continued in office are wrong, and an unconscionable diversion at this time
when our country needs focussed and determined political leadership.
We all now have to step up.
And that includes ACT.
It’s up to us to make the difference. It’s up to ACT – those of us in this room – to reverse New Zealand’s economic decline.
No other Party can do it or will do it. But we can.
Yes, the country is facing a huge challenge.
But we have huge natural resources. And we have a great resource in our people.
The problem is we don’t utilise either properly.
We must now take the opportunities we have for jobs and for growth. We can’t afford not to.
I want to focus on just one important opportunity, before moving on to wider issues.
John Boscawen spoke about it yesterday in his address.
New Zealand is rich in mineral resources.
But we aren’t taking advantage of them.
Last year the Government proposed to allow prospecting to establish in detail what mineral resources we had.
It wasn’t about mining, wasn’t about digging or drilling. Just looking to see what was there so that we could make an informed decision.
About a third of the total land area of our country is under the control of the Department of Conservation.
So looking means looking on Department of Conservation land.
But the simple suggestion that we ‘have a look to see what potential wealth we have’ alarmed those who rate a few tree more important than the chance
for a decent livelihood for working people.
The chance of decent jobs, good incomes, greater wealth for this country, higher revenue for government to fund our health and education systems – none of that rated as a serious consideration against the risk of disturbing a few wilderness areas.
100% pure and 100% broke was fine by them.
They protested on the streets in Auckland about the possibility that somebody might mine somewhere remote in the South Island, or somewhere not so distant like the Coromandel.
These were people for whom the notion of a reasoned trade-off between jobs and national wealth, versus some temporary and minor environmental damage was not an issue that should even be considered.
Indeed, New Zealanders must be denied even knowing what the trade-off is.
Even though there may be hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth available.
Most of the protests bordered on the hysterical.
Some of it was nuts.
The misrepresentation grotesque.
The picture the protestors tried to convey was of open-cast mines covering the landscape.
It was childish, adolescent.
And the media provided little critical scrutiny of their claims.
The fact is that most mining can be done with very little impact on the environment. A mine entrance doesn’t need to be large. The land required is tiny.
Our wilderness vast.
And it can easily be tidied up afterwards.
And besides, what is so wrong with a few open cast mines?
Actually, I find the scale of them dramatic and grand. Plenty of other people do too. The open cast mine in Waihi is a tourist attraction.
We need to get a sense of proportion about mining.
The Waihi open cast mine is just a pin-prick of land on the map of New Zealand, but it is also the financial backbone of a township, the source of jobs and thus dignity for local people.
So there we were, simply considering whether we should attempt to discover what resources we had.
But somewhere along the way the protestors got the upper hand.
Extraordinary.
And all those jobs that we could have, all those high paying jobs, all the investment, all the business activity, all the associated service industries –
engineering, transport, legal, accounting, all the technical trades – were cut short.
All because a couple of actresses decided they had enough jewellery already.
And so the Government lost its nerve.
As usual, it is the well-off middle class, those with opportunity, jobs and money, who stop developments that create jobs and a livelihood for those who don’t.
And it is not just some vocal protestors and environmental activists killing off jobs. Overly tough environmental constraints and rules and regulations do as well.
Our environmental requirements are so stringent that developments either never get off the ground, or they do so at great additional cost.
Or, as we have seen with Pike River, they end up with absurdly restrictive rules regarding environmental impacts on conservation land, so that options such as open cast mining are taken off the table.
We end up mining at great additional cost and much increased risk.
In the Pike River case, with tragic outcomes.
So a tiny patch of remote New Zealand was left undisturbed – a place most new nothing of, would never visit, or never think about.
And it is a place that is now a memorial to the men who worked there.
Not long after that disaster, we heard that Government was considering whether this mine should be open cast after all.
And with $10 billion of resource underground, surely we should have the ability to mine, open cast if necessary, and then repair any damage done when we have finished.
What a tragedy, what a waste.
We won’t lose that opportunity again. ACT with eight plus MPs will insist we open up our conservation land to the basic research to establish what resources are there.
With that information we can, as a nation, have a debate about whether we are going to pass up the potential of billions of wealth, and thousands of high paid jobs, for the sake of preserving untouched some tiny patches of our total conservation estate.
And the ACT Party, I can tell you, will be pushing hard in favour of jobs, not borrow and hope.
We need to start mining, start drilling, start digging.
We want our young people to have the option of working at high paid jobs in New Zealand’s mineral exploration and mining sectors, not just Australia’s.
It is unconscionable for well off middle class city dwellers to dictate what working people can and cannot do in their own patch of New Zealand.
ACT is focussed on jobs.
Jobs not welfare, or handouts.
Jobs not borrow and hope.
The ACT Party has been through some tough times, but we keep coming back stronger.
In 2005 our mission was simply to survive – and we did, by winning Epsom.
In 2008 our mission was to get rid of Helen Clark, to help form a centre-right government, and to nudge that government to do the right thing. And we did that too.
In this term of government we have had some important wins.
We passed Three Strikes, the culmination of more than a decade of work. I am proud of this – it will make our communities safer.
We convinced the Government to expand the 90-day trial period from firms with less than 20 staff, to all firms – that will create jobs.
We negotiated with the Government to start work on opening up ACC to competition – that will reduce costs for all New Zealanders.
We reformed Auckland governance, reducing staff numbers, cutting the price of water, and gave Auckland a structure to unlock its potential. We have
delivered a long overdue reform of the Local Government Act to improve transparency, accountability and financial management in local government.
We established a Productivity Commission to contribute the analysis needed for fundamental medium-term reform, and we established the 2025 Taskforce which has outlined the policies needed to get this country moving again.
We have improved regulatory processes in government, reduced compliance costs, repealed obsolete regulations, and have major regulatory reviews under way to save business around $300 million a year.
In education we have chipped away at the edge of the state monopoly with the Aspire scholarships.
We fought losing battles too: we tried unsuccessfully to stop the ETS, we fought against poor law on smacking, and we are still fighting to stop the latest round of foreshore and seabed legislation.
We tried to reintroduce a youth rate to give our youth a chance to get a job to set them on their way in life, and to their shame all other Parties voted against that – even the Maori Party, when Maori youth unemployment is 27 percent.
Sadly, most politicians don’t understand basic economics, and even when they do they lack the guts to stand up for what they know is right.
Finally, what we did promise, and will continue to deliver, is stable government.
The ACT Party continues to challenge National, but we will not pointlessly destabilise the government, nor break our promise to the people of New Zealand.
So, we have achievements to be proud of. We have nudged National along, and made a difference.
But it is not enough. Not remotely near enough.
Our mission statement in 2011 is to return with at least 8 ACT MPs, to make the changes that will get New Zealand working again.
Just imagine if we had had eight MPs since 2008. There’d be no foreshore and seabed mess. There’d be no ETS. No UNDRIP. No Maori Statutory Board.
And that’s just the stuff ACT would have stopped. Imagine what we could have achieved!
The reason New Zealand is at the brink of disaster is that we have politicised so much of our culture, so many of our economic decisions.
They aren’t honest transactions in a market, where you earn and spend your own money.
And so we get to the point where the bulk of our taxing and spending is just churning money from one pocket to another.
This churning of tax and spending makes productive kiwis both a funder and a ward of the state.
And that is wrong.
It is a downward spiral, a spiral of relative decline.
Sir Roger Douglas spoke yesterday of how Singapore overtook NZ over the course of just 30 to 40 years. They faced up to reality. We haven’t.
We need to be on a dramatically different path.
As with most things, it is all about incentives.
Politicians have every incentive to spend more, and promise too much, and no incentive to save money, to cut programmes, and to eliminate departments and agencies.
It serves only one simple purpose: to keep politicians in power.
Only ACT is prepared to speak out.
In the short term we need politicians with the courage to make tough decisions – politicians of the calibre of a Roger Douglas, Richard Prebble and Ruth Richardson.
That’s why ACT’s success is crucial to our country’s future.
For the longer term, we must change the political dynamic.
That’s what ACT’s ‘Spending Cap (People’s Veto) Bill’ does. The Bill caps real spending per capita. If any government wants to increase spending, they will have to seek the consent of the people through referendum.
That’s only fair – it’s the people’s money after all.
The Bill will change the political spending dynamic.
I could tell a similar story about red tape: poor incentives, too much regulation done in haste, with little thought, and at enormous cost. But we can’t depend on the occasional crusading politician trying to reduce regulation. We need to build the discipline into the heart of the decision process.
The ACT Party has the solution to this problem too a Regulatory Standards Bill. Again this is an attempt to shift political incentives, and to inject transparency and accountability into regulatory processes.
There is much more to be done. The 2025 Taskforce reports give a good summary of what we must do, and provides a profound analysis of the issues.
It was truly appalling that National dismissed that report for political reasons, without any consideration for New Zealand’s economic future.
With 8 plus ACT MPs the 2025 Taskforce report will be firmly on the government’s agenda post election 2011.
ACT’s success in this election has never been more important.
Our objective this year? To reverse New Zealand’s economic decline.
And remember this.
If not us, then who?
If not now, then when?
ACT is stepping up to the challenge.
We have a total focus on jobs.
So I say, let’s get started.
Let’s start with mining.
Thank you.
ENDS
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