Source: ACT Party
Delivered by ACT Leader David Seymour the Akarana Event Centre, Ōrākei.
Introduction
Thank you, Brooke, for your kind introduction. I’m biased, but I think you’re the Government’s most quietly effective Minister. Your labour law reforms are making it easier to employ workers and to be employed. Your minimum wage increases are announced early to give business certainty, and relief. You are taking on two of the hardest chestnuts in the workplace – holiday pay and health and safety – by listening to the people affected. You’ve put together an honest Royal Commission on COVID-19, and got wait times down for new passports and Citizenships. All the while you attract growing respect as a hard-working local MP here in Tamaki.
It’s easy to forget Brooke’s 32. She has the biggest future in New Zealand politics.
The only problem with mentioning one ACT MP is they’re all kicking goals with both feet, so you have to mention the lot. Nicole McKee is speeding up the court system, rewriting the entire Arms Act to make New Zealand safer, and reforming anti-money laundering laws so people can business done.
Andrew Hoggard handles the country’s biosecurity, managing would-be outbreaks with steady hands. He is also dealing to Significant Natural Areas that erode farmers’ property rights and correcting the naïve treatment of methane that punishes the whole country.
He’s able to do that in large part because of the work Mark Cameron did, and continues to do. From 2020 onwards he scared the bejesus out of every other party in rural New Zealand. He shifted the whole political spectrum right on the split gas approach, SNAs, and freshwater laws. Now the Government is changing those policies. As Chair of the Primary Production Committee, Mark stays in the headlines championing rural New Zealand every week. He is the definition of an effective MP.
Karen Chhour is the embodiment of ACT values. Her life gives her more excuses than anyone in Parliament, but she makes none, and she accepts none. She is reforming the government department that let her down when she was small. If every New Zealander had Karen’s attitude and values, we’d be a country with no problems.
Perhaps the biggest single policy problem we face is the Resource Management Act. Somone once said you can fill a town hall to stop anything in this country, but you can’t fill a telephone box to get something started. In steps Simon Court who, with Chris Bishop, is designing new resource management laws based on property rights. That’s an ACT policy designed to unleash the latent wealth our country has by letting people develop and use the property they own.
Our new MPs that you helped elect last year are also making their marks. Todd Stephenson has picked up the End of Life Choice baton, with a bill to extend compassion and choice to those who suffer the most: those with long-term, degenerative illnesses. Parmjeet Parmar is one of the hardest working MPs I have seen, and a great chair of the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee. Cam Luxton and Laura McClure speak to a new generation of young parents who want their children to grow up in a free society.
If you gave your Party Vote to ACT last year, you can be proud of the New Zealanders you put in Parliament to represent you. I am proud to lead this team of free thinkers in our House of Representatives, and I think we can all be proud of their efforts.
New Zealand’s origin story: a nation of immigrants
The summer is a good time to think about the state of our nation, and I got to thinking about who we are and how we got here. Whatever troubles we may face today, I couldn’t help coming back to something that unites New Zealand.
Our country at its best is a place that welcomes hopeful people from all over the earth. People with different languages, religions and cultures united by one thing. When you look at the map it jumps out at you. We are the most remote country on Earth. If you’ve never stood at Cape Reinga and looked out to see wide open spaces for 10,000 kilometres, you owe it to yourself just once.
It shows that one thing makes us all different from the rest of the world. No matter when or where you came from, you or your ancestors once travelled farther than anyone to give your children and theirs a better tomorrow.
That is the true Kiwi spirit. Taking a leap into the unknown for a chance at better. Compared with what divides us, our spirit as a nation of pioneers unites us ten times over. Migrating from oppression and poverty for freedom and prosperity is what it means to be Kiwi.
If that bright and optimistic side of our psyche, got half as much time as the whinging, we would all be better off. We would see ourselves as people unafraid of challenges, freed from conformity, with the power to decide our best days are always ahead of us.
New Zealand’s inherent tension: two tribes
I got to wondering why that isn’t a more popular story. Why do we cut down tall poppies? Why do we value conformity over truth? Why do people who came here for a better life grow up disappointed and move away again?
I believe our nation is dominated by two invisible tribes. One, I call ‘Change Makers’. People who act out the pioneering spirit that built our country every day. We don’t just believe it is possible to make a difference in our own lives; we believe it’s an obligation.
Change makers load up their mortgage to start a business and give other people jobs. They work the land to feed the world. They save up and buy a home that they maintain for someone else to live in. They study hard to extend themselves. They volunteer and help out where they can. They take each person as they find them. They don’t need to know your ancestry before they know how to treat you.
Too often, they get vilified for all of the above. I know there’s many people like that in this room today. ACT people are Change Makers; we carry the pioneering spirit in our hearts.
Then there’s the other tribe – people building a Majority for Mediocrity. They would love nothing more than to go into lockdown again, make some more sourdough, and worry about the billions in debt another day.
They blame one of the most successful societies in history for every problem they have. They believe that ancestry is destiny. They believe people are responsible for things that happened before they were born, but criminals aren’t responsible for what they did last week.
Far from believing people can make a difference in their own lives, they believe that their troubles are caused by other people’s success. They look for politicians who’ll cut tall poppies down – politicians who say to young New Zealanders ‘if you study hard, get good grades, get a good job, save money, and invest wisely, we’ll tax you harder’.
I wasn’t kidding about the lockdowns; they were a litmus test. In early 2022, after this city had been locked down for months, and the borders had been closed for two years, a pollster asked New Zealanders if they’d like to be locked down again for Omicron.
Now, I know it’s painful to think back, but bear with me. Omicron spread more easily than any earlier variant. It was also less harmful if you caught it. That was especially so because we were then among the most vaccinated nations on earth. The damage to business, education, non-COVID healthcare, and the government’s books was already massive and painful.
And yet, 48 per cent of New Zealanders wanted another lockdown for Omicron. 46 per cent didn’t. That for me put the tribes into sharp relief. If you were a business owner who needed to open, a parent worried about missed education, a migrant missing their family, or just someone who wanted their life back, you wanted to open.
When the Government finally lifted restrictions, many of those people left. Real estate agents report people selling because they’re moving to Australia every day. This is where the balance between these two invisible tribes comes into focus.
Remember the gap in that poll was two per cent. Since the borders opened a net 116,000 citizens have left New Zealand. That’s a touch over two per cent.
A tipping point
The more people with get up and go choose to get up and leave, the less attractive it is for motivated people to stay here.
Muldoon once quipped, ‘New Zealanders who leave for Australia raise the IQ of both countries.’ Actually, New Zealanders who leave for Australia are tipping us towards a Majority for Mediocrity. Motivated New Zealanders leaving is good news for the shoplifters, conspiracy theorists, and hollow men who make up the political opposition.
A few more good people leaving is all they need for their Majority of Mediocrity. The more that aspirational, hardworking people get up and leave New Zealand, the more likely it is we’ll get left-wing governments in the future.
That’s why I say we’re at a tipping point.
There’s another reason why the mediocrity majority is growing, young people feel betrayed and disillusioned.
A new generation looks at the housing market and sees little hope. Imagine you’re someone who’s done it all right, you listened to your teacher and did your homework. You studied for a tertiary education like everyone told you. Now you have $34,000 in debt, you start on $60,000, and you see the average house is 900,000 or fifteen times your (before tax) income.
Nobody can blame a young person for wondering if they aren’t better off overseas. Many decide they are. Those who stay are infected by universities with the woke mind viruses of identity politics, Marxism, and post-modernism.
Feeling like you’ll never own your own capital asset at the same time as some professor left over from the Cold War tells you about Marx is a dangerous combination.
This is the other political tipping point that risks manufacturing a majority for mediocrity. A bad housing market and a woke education system combined are a production line for left-wing voters.
The hard left prey on young New Zealanders. They tell them that their problems are caused by others’ success. That they are held back by their identity, but if they embrace identity politics, they can take back what’s theirs. Their mechanism is a new tax on wealth.
These are the opposite of the spirit brings New Zealanders to our shores in the first place. The state of our nation is that we’re at a tipping point , and what we do in the next few years will decide which way we go.
The short-term outlook is sunny, but only because Labour was so bad.
We can afford to hope that this year will be better than 2024. By that standard, 2025 will be a success. Interest rates will be lower. The Government will have stopped wasting borrowed money, banning things, punishing employers, landlords, farmers, and anyone else trying to make a difference, with another layer of red tape.
In fact, we have a Government that’s saving money, cutting red tape, and paring back identity politics. With those changes we will see more hope than we’ve seen in years, and hopefully a slowdown in citizens leaving. That is good, it’s welcome, and ACT is proud to be part of the coalition Government that’s doing it.
ACT is needed to be brave, articulate, and patriotic
The truth is, though, it’s easy to do a better job of Labour over 12 months. It’s much harder to muster the courage to keep making difficult decisions over several years, even if they’re not immediately popular. Our nation is in a century of decline. Just stopping one Government’s stupid stuff and waiting for a cyclical recovery won’t change the long-term trend. We need to be honest about the challenges we face and the changes needed to overcome them.
We need to act like a country at risk of reaching a tipping point and losing its first world status. We are facing some tough times, and tough times require tough choices to be made.
ACT’s goal is to keep the Government, and make it better. We may have gone into Government, but we never went into groupthink. It’s the role of ACT to be the squeaky wheel, pointing out where the Government needs to do better.
The Government cannot measure itself by just being better than Labour. Instead, we need to ask ourselves, is this policy good enough to make New Zealand a first world country that people want to stay in?
It’s easy to have big plans, we are the world, but charity begins at home. We need to focus only on what the government does, and ensure it does it well.
We need to think carefully about three areas of government activity: spending, owning, and regulating. There is nothing the government does that doesn’t come down to one of those three things.
Why government spends a dollar it has taxed or borrowed, and whether the benefits of that outweigh the costs.
Why government owns an asset, and whether the benefits to citizens outweigh the costs to taxpayers of owning it.
Why a restriction is placed on the use and exchange of private property, and whether the benefits of that regulation outweigh the costs on the property owner.
When it comes to spending, we have a burning platform.
Last year the economy shrunk by one per cent, even as the population grew slightly thanks to births and inbound migration. This year the Government is planning to borrow $17 billion, about $10 billion is for interest on debt, and we’ll have to pay interest on that debt the following year. Next year, government debt will exceed $200 billion.
There lots of reasons why this situation will get harder.
We’ve claimed an exclusive economic zone of four million square kilometres by drawing a circle around every offshore island we could name. We spend less than one per cent of GDP defending it, while our only ally, across the ditch, spends twice that.
Put another way, we’re a country whose government gives out $45 billion in payments each year but spends only $3.2 billion defending the place. Does that sound prudent to you? Doubling defense would cost another $3.2 billion per year, effectively paying more for what we already have. We may face pressure to do just that thanks to US foreign policy.
There’s a tail wind on balancing the books, and it’s affecting every developed country, our population is ageing faster than it’s growing.
Every year around 60,000 people turn sixty-five and become eligible for a pension. To the taxpayer, superannuation expenses increase by $1.4 billion each year.
Healthcare spending has gone from $20 billion to $30 billion in five years, but people are so dissatisfied that healthcare is now the third biggest political issue. Put it another way, we are now spending nearly $6,000 per citizen on healthcare.
How many people here would give up their right to the public healthcare system if they got $6,000 for their own private insurance? Should we allow people to opt out of the public healthcare system, and take their portion of funding with them so they can go private?
Education is similar. We spend $20 billion of taxpayer money every year, and every year 60,000 children are born. By my count that’s $333,000 of lifetime education spending for each citizen.
How many people would take their $333,000 and pay for their own education? How many young New Zealanders would be better off if they did it that way?
Instead of spending next year because we did it this year, we need to ask ourselves, if we want to remain a first world country, then do New Zealanders get a return on this spending that justifies taking the money off taxpayers in the first place? If spending doesn’t stack up, it should stop so we can repay debt or spend the money on something that does.
Then there’s the $570 billion, over half a trillion dollars of assets, the government owns. The one thing we know from state houses, hospital projects, and farms with high levels of animal death, is that the government is hopeless at owning things.
But did you know you own Quotable Value, a property valuation company chaired by a former race relations conciliator that contracts to the government of New South Wales?
What about 60,000 homes? The government doesn’t need to own a home to house someone. We know this because it also spends billions subsidising people to live in homes it doesn’t own. On the other hand, the taxpayer is paying $10 billion a year servicing debt, and the KiwiBuild and Kainga Ora debacles show the government should do as little in housing as possible.
There are greater needs for government capital. We haven’t built a harbour crossing for nearly seven decades. Four hundred people die every year on a substandard road network. Beaches around here get closed thanks to sewerage overflow, but we need more core infrastructure. Sections of this city are being red zoned from having more homes built because the council cannot afford the pipes and pumping stations.
We need to get past squeamishness about privatisation and ask a simple question: if we want to be a first world country, then are we making the best use of the government’s half a trillion dollars’ plus worth of assets? If something isn’t getting a return, the government should sell it so we can afford to buy something that does.
Finally, there’s regulation. That is placing restrictions on the use and exchange of property that the government doesn’t own or hasn’t taxed off the people who earned it already. That is, your property. Bad regulation is killing our prosperity in three ways.
It adds costs to the things we do. It’s the delays, the paperwork, and the fees that make too many activities cost more than they ought to. It’s the builder saying it takes longer to get the consent than it took to build the thing. It’s the anti-money laundering palaver that ties people in knots doing basic things but somehow doesn’t stop criminals bringing in half a billion dollars of P each year. It’s the daycare centre that took four years to open because different departments couldn’t agree about the road noise outside. I could go on all afternoon.
Then there’s the things that just don’t happen because people decide the costs don’t add up once the red tape is factored in.
Then there’s the big one that goes to the heart of our identity and culture. It’s all the kids who grow up in a country where people gave up or weren’t allowed to try. It’s the climbing wall at Sir Edmund Hillary’s old school with signs saying don’t climb. It’s the lack of nightlife because it’s too hard to get a license. It’s the fear that comes from worrying WorkSafe or some other regulator will come and shut you down. You can’t measure it, but we all know it’s there.
The Kiwi spirit we are so proud of is being chipped away and killing our vibe. Nobody migrated here to be compliant, but compliance is infantilising our culture, and I haven’t even mentioned orange cones yet.
If we want to remain first world, we need to change how we regulate. No law should be passed without showing what problem is being solved, whether the benefits outweigh the costs, and who pays the costs and gets the benefits. These are the basic principles of the Regulatory Standards Bill that the Government will pass this year.
Conclusion
Of course, the Government IS doing many things that will change how it operates. There is a drive to reduce waste. There is a drive to get more money from overseas investment. The Regulatory Standards Bill will change how we regulate. The Resource Management Act is being replaced. Anti-money laundering laws are being simplified. Charter schools are opening, more roads are being built. These are all good things.
But make no mistake, our country has always been the site of a battle between two tribes. The effect of emigration, and the world faced by young New Zealanders risks creating a permanent majority for mediocrity. Our country is at a tipping point.
We need honest conversations about why government spends, owns, and regulates, and whether those policies are good enough to secure our future as a first world nation.
You may have seen the ACT Party has been involved in a battle to define the principles of the Treaty democratically. It’s caused quite a stir. If you missed it, please check out treaty.nz where we outline what it’s about. It may still succeed this time, or it may be one of those bills that simply breaks the ground so something like it can proceed in the future.
Either way, the tribe of change makers has a voice. People who want equal rights for all New Zealanders to be treated with respect and dignity because they’re citizens have a position that others need to refute. Good luck to them arguing against equal rights.
It also shows something else, that ACT is the party prepared to stand up when it’s not easy and it’s not popular. That’s exactly the type of party our country needs in our Government.
To all the Change Makers who proudly put us there, thank you, and no matter how daunting this tipping point may feel, together we can ensure our best days are still ahead of us.
