This is my first opportunity to speak in the House since I was given the role of Labour’s spokesperson on the environment. I would like to begin my contribution by thanking and acknowledging all those members from across the House, and of course in my own party, who have been good enough to congratulate me on that new responsibility. I am looking forward to working in the portfolio.

When I spoke on the Budget in the last week Parliament sat before the adjournment, I said that it failed to mention the environment once, and that is a major omission. I also said that the Budget was a dangerous gamble, because it contains revenue assumptions that will not survive any further worsening of international economic conditions. But there is another major problem with the Budget, and with the economic policies that accompany it. Those policies mean that for fixed, low, and middle-income earners, everyday Kiwis, day-to-day living costs will rise steeply.

The National Government knows this, because it has tried to hide it by saying that no New Zealanders will be left worse off than they were before the Budget. But on this side of the House we can see through that, because once we do the maths, taking into account price rises, interest rate rises like the official cash rate rise yesterday, accident compensation levy rises, the emissions trading scheme’s effect on power and petrol price rises, and the GST increase, all at a time of nil wage growth, it is obvious that the very people who need and deserve help will not get it from this Government.

The Budget is not fair. Despite all the rhetoric, it is a Budget that simply caters to the few. It harms our many hard-working families. Let us look at where most of the money is going. Fully a third of the value of the tax cuts will go to the top 5 percent of the population in New Zealand, and fully 15 percent of the value of those tax cuts will go to the top 1 percent of income earners. How will the National Government fund that? It is doing two things, and they are both unfair and unwise.

First, it is borrowing to fund these tax cuts. There will be an extra $50 million of debt for all New Zealanders, just to give a big boost to the very best-off. That is just not sensible, and it is not fair to saddle ordinary, hard-working people with millions of dollars of debt to reward just an elite few. Borrowing to fund tax cuts is at best stupid, but when they are as inequitable as these tax cuts, it is also immoral. The Government knows this, because in the Minister’s Executive Summary in the Budget documents is found the following quote: “it would be irresponsible to saddle the next generation with further debt to pay for tax cuts now.”—even though that is exactly what the resulting legislation does.

The Budget is also unfair because the Government claims on the one hand not to leave anyone worse off, whereas in reality it has just hidden the many extra costs with which it will burden the majority of New Zealanders. The Budget will disadvantage those already struggling, and reward those who need the least help. Let us take the example of an average male worker who earns $50,000 a year. The Budget claims at face value that this worker will receive an extra $29 a week, leaving him $16 better off each week when the extra $13 a week in GST is taken into account. But in claiming that, the Government has ignored some very obvious factors—pointed out by Treasury—in order to create an illusion. The Government knows that this worker will not be better off. It knows that it is making him, and the many other workers like him, worse off.

There has been no taking into account the estimated 6 percent inflation that the country will face in the coming year—and that is not something that slips the mind too easily. If it has been omitted, it is safe to say that that omission is intentional. The reason the National Government has failed to take inflation into account in the information given to ordinary Kiwis, is that this would expose how an average worker would end up losing $19 a week, thanks to higher inflationary prices. That is just not fair. If we take into account increased accident compensation levies, costs to the worker if he has a student loan outstanding, early childhood education cost increases, higher power prices, and higher taxes on things like rent and tobacco, our average worker could, in reality, end up $30 a week worse off than he was before the Budget. And the worker will be getting worse off still, because as we saw last year we are in times of relatively low or nil real wage growth. I cannot for the life of me see what is fair or good about that.

The Budget and the propaganda surrounding it have been deceptive. I say this because the Government knows that what it is doing is wrong, and because it knows that taking from the many to give to the few cannot be morally justified. It is a Budget of broken promises, and it is one on which the Government will be judged.