SPEECH: Paul Henry to Botany Town Hall

Thank you very much!

This is town hall number 33, and we’re on the home stretch. I’ve been driving around the country in a van with an enormous photograph of my face on the side. From Northland to Bluff, toots of support. Only a couple of people in Wellington offered the one-fingered salute – which, for Wellington, I’m counting as a landslide endorsement.

One of the key reasons I’m standing is because I believe in my lifetime this is the most vital election not to get wrong. 

ACT is campaigning to Unlock New Zealand’s Potential. And boy, do we have potential. Five million of us, sitting at the bottom of the world, blessed with more talent, ingenuity, and sheer natural beauty and resource than any nation has a right to. We should be one of the wealthiest, safest, most envied places on Earth.

So what’s keeping our potential locked up?

All elections are labelled in some way. In 1984 it was the Snap Election. In 2020 it was the Covid election, and many people are looking at this as the cost of living election. While the cost of living is a major concern, particularly with some of the key factors largely out of our control, it draws our attention to the real focus of the election. This is a productivity and debt election. We have to address New Zealand’s low productivity and high debt. 

So what’s keeping our potential locked up?

Nine billion dollars.

That is what New Zealand is paying this year just in interest on government debt. Not paying the principal off. Just servicing the tab. Nine billion dollars a year works out to more than a million dollars every single hour of the day and night. If I talk for twenty minutes tonight, that’s another $340,000 gone before you even get to ask a question. And we are borrowing more money just to pay that interest.

Look at what that $9 billion buys us. Nothing. Not a single nurse on a ward, not a teacher in a classroom, not one pothole filled on the State Highway. Interest is simply the invoice for dinners we’ve already eaten and digested years ago. That annual interest bill is now bigger than our entire combined budget for police, courts, and prisons. That same money could build five brand-new Dunedin hospitals every single year, or double the medicines budget, then double it again and still leave change on the counter.

A lot of that tab was run up before this Coalition arrived. But I won’t pretend it’s been fixed, because it hasn't.

We must get on top of the debt issue now because if we don’t it will only get harder. Sadly ACT is the only party taking it seriously. 

The Taxpayers’ Union has independently costed each party’s offers, bribes, whatever you want to call them.

• Labour: $34 billion

• National: $5.1 billion

• Green: $245 billion

• Opportunity: $230 billion

• Te Pāti Māori: Too barking mad to cost. Literally priceless.

And so what about ACT? $18 billion. Negative. While every other party is promising to spend, tax, borrow,  and regulate New Zealand’s future. ACT knows no country has found prosperity taking that path.

Here is the dirty secret about debt. When a government taxes you and spends your money today, at least you know about it. You can feel it. You can write an angry email to your MP, you can march in the street, or you can vote the bastards out at the next election. Debt is different. With debt, the people who pick up the tab aren't in the room. They can’t vote. Some of them haven't learned to read yet. 

The Americans started a revolution over taxation without representation. We’ve found a way to do it to people who haven’t been born yet.

My wife and I have ten grandchildren between us. My daughter Bella has twins. If nothing changes, when those twins get their very first paychecks years from now, a chunk of their hard-earned income will be automatically skimmed off to pay the interest on a free school lunch handed out today. A moment’s nourishment for a lifetime of debt. I am not against feeding hungry children. I am against doing it on a credit card issued in a child’s name.

Every generation is supposed to hand the next one something better. A farm, a family business, a house with the mortgage paid off, or a country slightly more prosperous than the one they inherited. But we’ve become a country that squanders the achievements of previous generations without building enough for the next.

So what are we handing over? At the moment, an invoice.

Now, I know not all borrowing is bad. Think about your own household. A mortgage is sensible borrowing. You buy a house you intend to live in for thirty years, so it makes total sense to spread that cost across the thirty years you use it. Governments can, and should, do the same. A road, a school, or a hospital serves a community for generations, so spreading the capital cost makes moral and economic sense.

Most of our current borrowing isn't building long-term assets for the future though. It’s covering the daily, operational running costs of a bloated state.

ACT can point to at least $14 billion in savings secured this term. But slowing down isn't stopping. Every single day, more cash goes out the door than comes in. On current forecasts, national debt will climb to nearly $233 billion by 2030. You can’t sustain that in a home, you can’t sustain that in a business, and you can’t sustain it in a country.

There are always the armchair academics who lean back, stroke their chin, and say: "Ah, but Paul, our debt-to-GDP ratio is low compared to Europe or America."

That is like saying the leaking roof must be fine because the house next door is flooding. I don't want New Zealand to be the least bad country, I want us to be the best country.

When you spend more than you earn year after year, there are only three levers you can pull:

1.  Borrow more, and shove the bill onto your children.

2. Tax more, and choke the life out of working families, businesses, and the economy.

3. Stop wasting money.

ACT chooses option three.

So where do you actually start? You start at the very top, in the engine room.

New Zealand has 28 ministers, 43 departments, and 267 regulatory bodies. Ireland, with about the same population, gets by with 15 ministers and 18 departments. Here, one department answers to 23 ministers. Ask who’s in charge and the honest answer is “yes.” ACT will campaign for a cabinet of 18 ministers and 19 departments, with one minister responsible for each, so there’s someone to hold to account. ACT is the accountability party.

More importantly, we will give those ministers the actual authority to manage. Right now, when a public department fails spectacularly, the minister gets dragged onto the 6 o'clock news to take the hits. But that minister didn't hire the Chief Executive running the department, and legally, they can't fire them either.

Imagine owning a retail store where the manager is appointed by a committee in another town, you aren't allowed to sack them no matter how much stock goes missing, and then you get publicly blamed when the shelves are empty! No real business could survive an afternoon under those rules.

ACT will change the law. Ministers will appoint their chief executives on fixed-term contracts. If a chief executive is bloody hopeless or doesn’t implement the policies the public voted for, the minister can show them the door. It is that simple.

Outside of core frontline services, health, education, police, and child protection, the rest of the government bureaucracy is spending 20 percent more per person today than it did in 2017, even after adjusting for inflation. Does anyone in this room feel 20 percent better governed than you did nine years ago?

Of course not. We are paying for an army of consultants, middle managers and climate committees whose primary output is writing reports about reports. First on my chopping block is the Climate Change Commission.

ACT’s plan protects core areas like health, education, police, and defence while cutting the back-office bureaucracy to 2017 levels. With how far technology has come, there is no reason that government shouldn’t be getting more productive and efficient every year.

Our plan is fully costed, and it reduces national debt by $12.4 billion by 2031.

Because if we don't fix this core economic equation, we truly are in the shit. High debt and endless spending breed high inflation, high interest rates, and low wages. That drives up rents and mortgages, makes households poorer, and pushes our brightest young people out the door.

Two of my own grandchildren live in Australia today, because their parents realised they could offer them a better standard of living across the Tasman. I don’t want to be a country that exports its children and keeps the debt.

That is why your Party Vote is so important. A Party Vote for ACT isn't just a vote to stop borrowing for the groceries. It is a vote for a government that is smaller, sharper, and actually works for you.

A Government that’s lean and focused on reducing red tape to create a platform on which the private sector can thrive. 

Last time Labour was in power, they added $100 billion to our national debt and blew out the bureaucracy by more than a third. Now they are itching for another turn, surrounded by parties whose only economic plan is to spend even more of your money, whilst dividing our population into competing racial groups. ACT is the only party with the courage to make the tough but necessary decisions.

I look at my grandchildren, and I know what I want to leave them. It’s not a pile of debt. I know that’s not what you want to leave yours, either. They can’t be in this room tonight to speak for themselves. So for the remainder of this campaign, we have to stand up and vote on their behalf.

Over the last three years, New Zealand has had a gentle nudge in the right direction. What this country urgently needs now is a lurch.

I love this country too much to watch it trip over its own feet. I’ve entered politics to hold feet to the fire. To drive the kind of change I’ve talked about tonight further and faster in the right direction.

I’m not touring our beautiful country because I need the exercise… although…

And I’m not here because I think New Zealand is doomed. Quite the opposite.

I’m doing it because this country is magnificent: we’re educated, inventive, resourceful and surrounded by extraordinary natural advantage.

We split the atom, created conductive plastic, surrounded animals with electric wire and now with wireless collars. We launch satellites for NASA, and produce bunches of balloons for the world’s children. We build billion-dollar companies. We need to celebrate it loudly and dream bigger. 

When ACT says it will build a world-class National Cancer Centre, rather than the media trying to find reasons it won’t work, they should be celebrating a real advancement in health outcomes – saving over a thousand lives a year and vastly improving quality of life for many thousands more.

Five million people have the capacity right here to build one of the wealthiest, safest and most envied countries on Earth. But potential must be unlocked. That requires political courage, a willingness to tell the truth and a population that still believes tomorrow can and should be better than today.

New Zealand is paradise. It’s time to celebrate our achievements and save the future. That is why I urge you to give your Party Vote to ACT.

Thank you very much. Now... ask me anything!