Easy Lies. Hard Truths

The Haps

Parliament is now in recess for the next two weeks, but ACT is continuing to win the argument in Wellington, helped along by the hard reality that New Zealand cannot keep borrowing and spending forever. This Budget delivers what should have started two years ago: no new taxes, a pathway back to surplus, fewer bureaucrats, and disciplined spending at a time when many other governments around the world are throwing caution to the wind. The value ACT brings to Government is now measured in billions.

Free Press readers will be pleased to know that David Seymour delivered a cracker Budget speech under the title Easy Lies. Hard Truths. It is an impressive, wide-ranging address that shows just how clearly he understands where New Zealand is headed and the progress being made repairing the damage left by Labour.

We have reprinted the speech below, and you can also watch the full address here.

We are sending this speech to everyone we know with an interest in politics, even at the risk of criticism from those who dislike David Seymour or the ACT Party. Regardless, we believe it is time more people recognised that David Seymour is by far the strongest politician in Parliament today.

If New Zealand is going to continue getting back to something resembling the democratic, aspirational country we once knew, ACT must be re-elected in November. Your Party Vote for ACT will help ensure that.

Easy Lies. Hard Truths

There are easy lies and there are hard truths, and after years of easy lies about our nation’s finances, we are coming to the hard truths. We cannot spend and borrow our way to prosperity. We have to pay the bills and we have to balance the books. And finally, in this 2026 Budget, we are bringing together the hard truths to chart a course to honest prosperity where we pay our way, we balance the books, and people can again afford to live comfortably because the Government is managing its money as carefully as they’ve been forced to manage their own.

This Budget is backing the hard-working people who get up and make a go of it while cutting the things that don’t work to provide more of what does.

It is, I think, a tribute to three parties working together, Minister of Finance and associate Ministers of Finance from ACT, National, and New Zealand First coming together to create this third Budget of our three-party coalition. That is a triumph that is better than our worst enemies’ worst nightmares—that we are able to deliver, in challenging times, in the middle of a global oil shock, a pathway to a balanced Budget earlier, with no new taxes. That is the choice that countries are facing around the world, because there are two paths to balancing the books: there is either tax more or spend less. As I remember Nicola Willis once saying, we don’t have a revenue problem; we have a spending problem in Government. If you want to solve the problem of borrowing and deficits, you must get on top of wasteful Government spending.

There is a contrast opening up, not just across the divide of this aisle but across the Tasman Sea. You look across the ditch, and we’re not feeling like the lucky country so much now, are we, cobber? I mean, those guys are going to have deficits through to 2035, and new taxes to try and balance their Budget. What that tells you is that, if you try to squeeze people until the pips squeak, if you believe the path to prosperity is to take money from anyone you can find that has it, until nobody wants to create wealth in your country, eventually you will all be poor. In fact, the only thing that socialist thinking has done for the poor is give them a lot more company. That’s why this Budget is just what the doctor ordered.

The spending amount—the new spending—was going to be $2.4 billion in December; it’s now going to be $2.1 billion. That’s $300 million less, and it’s the same for the next four years. That’s $1.2 billion less spending than was expected just six months ago. That is a triumph, and it has been done with a plan to have fewer Government departments and fewer bureaucrats. It’s just what the doctor ordered, and it’s something the ACT Party doctor was prescribing years ago. It’s a prescription that has become increasingly popular. We’re going to see the amount of money taken up by Government down to 30.3 percent of GDP, after it peaked under Labour at 35 percent of GDP. That means that, for every $20 in the economy, we are saving people $1 by spending less every year. That is the kind of progress towards the smaller, more efficient Government that we need.

What are the dividends? Over 200,000 new jobs forecast, 2.7 percent economic growth year on year, and the surplus coming forward a whole year to 2028-29. This is a Government that is fixing what matters, and what matters is not finding new taxes and new revenue tools but fixing the spending to do more for less. On that, this Budget will be familiar to many New Zealanders, to many households. It will be familiar to many businesses, who have to cut something that doesn’t work if they see something new that they want to spend on. That means, wherever we’ve spent something new, the chances are it’s come from the $1.7 billion in savings that we have been able to make. If you want something new, you have to make savings elsewhere, and finally, after years of thinking that somehow economic gravity did not apply to Governments, especially those filled with Labour politicians, we have come back to Earth, back to reality, because, “Oh, there goes gravity.” We are passing a balanced Budget in just a few years thanks to our responsibility.

These choices allow us to do a number of new things that I believe will ensure New Zealanders have the opportunity in education, the care in health, the safety in the street, and the prosperity of knowing that, actually, your efforts can make a difference. If you make good choices, the deal can be kept: you can find yourself with a home and a career and a family and security by doing the right thing. For too many people, that has been lost for too long because the Government has been sucking up any extra cream that they created. We’re going to see $54 million more in Pharmac, all of these things made possible by saving more money. That comes after we gave $1.774 million extra money to Pharmac to fill in a fiscal hole left by Labour, and then another $604 million for extra medicines that have so far benefited a quarter of a million Kiwis with new medicines they would not have had access to, had it not been for this extra spending. And we’re now putting another $54 million into Pharmac, the largest of the specific headline initiatives under this Budget. Pharmac and medicines have experienced a revolution. I’d like to thank all of my colleagues, especially Todd Stephenson, who had been such a strong advocate for making better use of medicines.

It is now seven years and two months and 13 days since I sat in opposition and stood against the whole Parliament, against rushed gun laws, and I said these people who have firearms are not actually bad people. What has happened is bad, but they do not deserve to be punished for it. As a result, we, as the ACT Party, have stood up for the simple idea that, yes, firearms can be dangerous, and, yes, we need to ensure that people are kept safe from them, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of treating legitimate firearms owners with the basic respect and dignity that is due to all law-abiding Kiwis. With Nicole McKee, we see $45 million in this Budget put towards a new firearms safety authority. It never should have been the Police, and that will also ensure that those licence fees don’t have to go through the roof to pay for it. They will be stable.

All over the country, we see wilding pines sucking up water that could have been used to grow food and generate electricity. There’s $79 million in this Budget for Andrew Hoggard’s initiative to cut down those wilding pines. You might have seen on TVNZ 1 that he’s already started. He’s not the kind of politician that leaves it to other people.

Then, with Simon Court and my good friend Chris Bishop, we have seen enormous effort to fix perhaps the biggest handbrake on New Zealanders’ opportunity in this country, and that is the bureaucracy called the Resource Management Act that has made it so easy for so many people to say no, leaving a whole lot of people wondering when on earth we are going to start saying yes in this country. Well, I’m proud that we have a Resource Management Act currently before select committee, coming back to this House soon, that will put property rights at the centre of resource management law. That is an ACT Party achievement. It’s probably something I’m prouder of than anything, but it also has got to be put in place with enormous expertise. Having Simon Court and Chris Bishop on the case makes me very confident and very determined to win the election so that they can do the implementation. They’re going to put in place electronic record-keeping in consents—like we’re a modern, civilised country—so you can get your consents faster and be able to develop your own property, which some would call tino rangatiratanga. Who says the ACT Party doesn’t support article 2 of the Treaty?

Then there’s infrastructure, and there are so many projects, but I just want to talk about two. My mum was the Chief Pharmacist at the Northland District Health Board, and in the school holidays or after school, I sometimes used to go into the hospital pharmacy. That was a wee while ago, and the building wasn’t in great shape back then.

To see Whangārei Hospital built for the people of Northland, and restored, I think is a long-overdue investment. And the Waikato Expressway—whenever I venture down south, past the Bombays, I’m brought to life by the amount of energy in that part of the country, the “golden triangle”, and we have a road that is ready to go, has a benefit-cost ratio—or, as Julie Anne Genter would say, a “bee-cee-arr”—of 3.2 to ensure that we’re getting real economic growth and opportunity in that very fertile part of the country.

We’re also doubling the number of trade training apprentices. Paying wealthy constituents of mine their entire university fees for one year so they could kick the tyres—that was wasteful spending. I don’t know how many people came up to me and said, “My kids don’t need this.” They even said, “I don’t need this.”, the really honest ones. We’re going to finish that and double the number of people in trade training.

I see Cameron Luxton up there. I think it’s important. We haven’t had enough respect for the trades. We’ve sold the cap and gown dream with subsidised university degrees to all and sundry who show up for one, but the quality’s gone down and the trades have been neglected. Some people even get one of these degrees and retrain in the trades anyway. I actually met with the Plumbers Guild. They said the number one source of recruits for apprentice plumbers is Auckland University of Technology (AUT). I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with AUT, but that’s what they told me. We are slowly rebalancing from this oversold cap and gown dream to a practical reality of trade training.

We’re seeing $1.5 billion on naval capacity. In our party campaign, we said it’s not sustainable to have one ally that spends twice as much and expect them to help us when we won’t help ourselves. We were spending only 0.9 percent of GDP on defence. That’s heading quickly towards 2 percent. With Chris Penk, our Defence Minister, a former submariner in his own right, we are seeing an enormous investment in naval capacity, and not just buying conventional stuff but the kind of drones, some of them made in New Zealand, that will define future military conflicts. Anyone who’s watching anything in Ukraine will know all about that.

I’m pleased to see $40 million in uplift for early childhood centres. We’re deregulating, we’re cutting the red tape, but they face cost pressures and they’re getting a 1.5 percent uplift, which, critically, will begin on 1 July. They don’t have to wait until the end of the year, like they normally do under Budgets. That money will start flowing. There will be additional funding for people who are bringing up the youngest New Zealanders. That will start almost immediately.

But the thing I’m perhaps most proud of in this Budget, of the new things that this Government is spending on is the council growth incentives. Brought together again with my good friend Chris Bishop, we have put together this policy that makes a long-term dream a reality. I announced this policy as ACT’s housing policy in 2016, much closer to when I was visiting Whangārei Hospital. We went out and we said, “Look, if we don’t give councils a reason to say yes, then they’ll look at all the reasons to say no.” All the infrastructure costs, the grumpy neighbours, the liabilities—so many reasons to say no to someone building a house. Why don’t we give them a reason to say yes?

Back then, we called it GST sharing. The spirit of that is here. If a council consents a building, then they will get a quarter of a percent of the value of that building. But if they do more than 1 percent of their existing housing stock, it goes up to half a percent. If they do more than 2 percent of their existing housing stock, if they consent that many houses in one year, then they will get 1.25 percent.

What that means in real terms is that if Auckland had done this last year, they would have got $32 million. If you think about the Queenstown Lakes District—one of the fastest growing regions in the country, under massive infrastructure pressure—they would have got $7.5 million. You think about Christchurch, you think about Selwyn—a lot of people flocking to Christchurch. It’s a cool place these days, you know? They’d get about $8 million each of those two adjacent councils. In the context of a council balance sheet, this is serious money.

What’s more, you have people—the mayor and the chief executive of the council—going down to the planning department and saying, “Hey, why don’t you issue a few more consents? We’ll get more money from the Government.” We’ve got to change that political economy. This was something that Brooke van Velden put up in a Member’s Bill five years ago. The whole Parliament except Labour voted for it and now it’s become a reality, because everyone on this side of the House knows if the next generation’s going to have the security and the affordability of housing, then it’s going to take getting the incentives right.

The ACT Party is the party of sensible economists. By the way, 100 percent of the economists in this Parliament are members of the ACT Party. Same with engineers; we’ve got 100 percent of them too. If it starts with “E”—we’ve got all the Es. I just want to say one other thing about this—

**Hon Member:**Building practitioners.

Hon DAVID SEYMOUR: And 100 percent of the licensed building practitioners, yeah. This is being done with no new taxes. In fact, there are even some reductions in taxes. For a long time, the Foreign Investment Fund tax has been a bugbear where people have said, “Look, I want to live in New Zealand, but sometimes I want to invest overseas and I don’t want a stealth wealth tax taking my money—5 percent deemed return that I just have to pay.” Lately, it’s been pretty hard to make that return and so we are introducing the revenue accounting method, not just for people who moved here recently, but for all New Zealanders who are liable for the Foreign Investment Fund tax.

We’re increasing the threshold for paying that tax to $100,000 from $50,000. That amounts, on the Foreign Investment Fund, to a $72.5 million tax cut to encourage people to stay in New Zealand and invest, and that, to me, says hope and growth.

That is the choice that we face in this Government and that we face in politics in every country around the world. I said in my maiden statement to this House 12 years ago nearly, if you know the answer to a simple question, you know everything about a person’s politics. There are people who think there is only so much to go around and the point of politics is to take from one person and give to another person who will vote for you. That is zero-sum thinking. If you listen to, say, I don’t know, the Greens, that’s all they ever say, that your problems are caused by someone else’s success and we’re going to take their money to give it to you and you’ll be better off. That’s the only thing they have to say. I see poor Lan Pham, who in fairness is kind of a hostage in the Green Party but sometimes does talk about the environment. She’s honest with herself. She knows that’s all her colleagues ever say.

The other alternative is positive-sum thinking—positive-sum thinking that actually we can trade value for value with each other and get stronger together, that when people save and invest and put something away today, that’s not a bad thing. That’s actually the only way that we’re able to produce more each day, to save a bit more, to consume a bit more, to do things smarter and actually be able to provide the things we need while having the innovation to reduce our impact on the planet. That is positive-sum thinking that the only real resource in the world is human creativity. Human creativity thrives in a free society where we back people, even if they’re a bit different, even if we don’t quite like them. We say, “You’ve got a right to make the most of your time on earth.” You never know when somebody in that position—I see Julie Anne Genter; she’s perplexed. She’s shaking her head. She’s never heard of this before. Well, buckle in, Julie Anne Genter.

This is the way that people discover new things—new medicines, new technology, new sources of energy, new ways to move around the world, new ways to live happier, healthier, wealthier lives. On this side of the House, and particularly in the ACT Party, we stand for that simple idea that the creative powers of a free society are the only true resource that we have. If we unleash them under the rule of law, with respect for the equal dignity of each and every one of us who inhabits this free society, then you just don’t know what we can achieve, but maybe we will show that Kiwis really can fly. Thank you, Mr Speaker.