The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things.
Of shoes and ships and sealing wax; of cabbages and kings.
And also, Mr Speaker, the Appropriation (2009-10) Supplementary Estimates) Bill - which seeks parliamentary authorisation of the individual appropriations and changes contained in this massive document before us - involving some 68 Votes and running to 921 pages.
Not all will have read every page.
I have, however, been through pretty much all of it myself. And, more to the point of the broader implications of this Debate, perhaps, I have followed the Government's direction of the economy throughout the 2009-10 year to date, and the management of its public finances with careful interest and some sympathy.
Sympathy, not because of any political empathy with its philosophical outlook but because of a sobered recognition of the enormity of the problems facing this country.
And, on further analysis, that sympathy merges into an endless pity. Because it is easily apparent that this Government is mired in an outmoded brand of economic orthodoxy that will be unable to solve those problems.
The Supplementary Estimates themselves make for sobered reading.
The net position of the Crown's income and expenditure is $3.1 billion worse today than anticipated by the Government in its Budget of May 2009.
Government expenditure for the year is set to be $3.3 b. higher than originally estimated - up from $74.2 b. to $77.5 b.
Crown revenue and capital receipts, are set to be only $0.2 b. higher - up from $64.7 b. to $64.9 b.
So the net deficit will stand at $12.6 b., up from the original estimate of $9.5 b.
I do not hold the Minister of Finance personally liable for these changes - they reflect the vagaries of macro-economic change affecting a small and open economy in times of global turbulence.
Nor do I wish to comment on the relative priorities accorded to departmental expenditure patterns:
- whether Defence should have more or less than Education,
- what revenue should come from Gaming,
- how much should be advanced to student loans,
- what amount should be set aside for Kyoto liabilities
- even though the Green Party has views on this as well.
My comment concerns the broader issue of the underlying tenets of belief on which the Government pursues its macro-economic management.
Mr Speaker, we ventured our critique of this in February, in response to the Prime Minister's Statement opening Parliament. National believes the way to lift the country's economic performance is through continuous growth. The Greens do not.
The Minister of Finance just today, in introducing this Bill, spoke of the need for 'sustainable growth'. In a world where the global ecological overshoot is around 30%, that amounts to a contradiction, certainly for the rich Western part of the world of which we still count ourselves a member.
We agree with the Government that the NZ economy needs to be a smarter economy - through up-skilling, innovation in IT, and adding value to our export commodities.
But there the similarity ends. The Government is prepared to do two things that we believe are fundamentally wrong and will prove ruinous for New Zealand.
First, it has an outmoded perception of the relationship between the economy and the environment. It believes it can balance economic opportunity with environmental responsibility. That is misguided.
It was the President of Maldives who cut through this commercial hubris. "You cannot", he said, "cut a deal with Mother Nature". He should know. His islands are becoming submerged, through the climate change that neo-classical economic model has bequeathed us.
Our mindless national contribution to the challenge of climate change is to set aside a modest $546 m. in Kyoto indulgences for 2013, and to bicker over whether or not we are out in front of the Western pack with our ETS scheme. As if an existential challenge to humankind can be priced in our supplementary estimates.
You do not need to be a rocket-scientist to know, intuitively, that the human economy is a sub-set, a wholly owned subsidiary, of the environment. The new emerging model of ecological economics, on which the Green Party bases its economic policies, is set to replace the neo-classical model pursued by neo-liberal governments of modern times.
Second, the Government is prepared to sell off our asset wealth to pay our way through recession. It runs amok with bilateral treaties that masquerade as free trade agreements but which, in reality, have more impact through their free investment provisions. We now face the prospect of selling off, not exactly our strategic assets, but our valuable productive land to regional and global corporations.
Not only does this surrender our sovereign control of New Zealand's economic destiny; it also drives up the price of land for purchase by Kiwi citizens and increases the pressure on our private sector debt. This impacts on the Crown revenue potential and affects the next year's budget, and through that, the supplementary estimates.
Mr Speaker, in March during the 2008-9 Financial Review debate, I spoke of the need for a new alternative economic model for this country and indeed for the global economy. This is known as the steady-state economy, based on the concept of a dynamic equilibrium. Unlike orthodox economics of the past 70 years, this model takes into account the natural resource base in the pre-productive process and the waste disposal in the post-productive process.
If we do not do this, if we retain the orthodox economic model, we shall find, indeed we are already finding, that growth is proving to be uneconomic since it is not sustainable in the medium term.
As I said in March, we have reached the stage where we must incorporate environmental indicators into our macro-economic management and our national financial accounts.
To that end, Mr Speaker, I have produced a members bill designed to assist us all in approaching this. My Public Finance Act (Sustainable Development Indicators) Amendment Bill will ensure that in fulfilling its macro-economic obligations under the Public Finance Act, the Government will have regard to the sustainable development of the country.
The Bill aims to consolidate and amend the law governing the use of public financial resources to ensure that the economic management of New Zealand is undertaken consistently with the interests if the sustainable development of New Zealand over the long-term.
Specifically, the Bill will obligate the Minister to report to the House, in the context of the Budget presentation, a series of sustainable development indicators.
These indicators, which will remain in terms of physical rather than monetary measures, are already being produced by the Government Statistician. I pay tribute to the quality of the work being produced by Stats Dept, in particular the 2009 report "Measuring New Zealand's Progress using a Sustainable Development Approach".
The Bill will also have the Minister address the ecological footprint' and the 'human development index', as measurement's of New Zealand's progress over the longer term.
Mr Speaker. I mention the Bill because, if adopted, it will affect the financial direction of the Government in the next Budget. It therefore stands as a signal to the Government today that there are ways in which the financial direction of the country, both in terms of the May 2009 Budget and the June 2010 Supplementary Estimates, could have been improved
And it stands as signal that they can be improved in the future.
