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Resilient Regions For A Resilient New Zealand

New Zealand First
Media Advisory
27 NOVEMBER 2015

EMBARGOED TILL DELIVERED

Rt Hon Winston Peters MP
Speech to a Public Meeting
Invercargill Working Men’s Club
Esk Street,
Invercargill
12.30pm, 27th November, 2015


Resilient Regions For A Resilient New Zealand

It is a pleasure to be here in Invercargill at the Working Men’s Club, scene of the 2011 election campaign leak of the teapot tapes contents. You were first to know then, you are going to be first to know now.

It is pleasing to have another New Zealand First MP in the Mainland. Ria Bond hit the ground running when she entered Parliament this year. She is building our membership and bringing a strong voice for Southland to the capital.

Southland is Heartland New Zealand - and a highly productive and enterprising region.

Given the huge contribution provincial New Zealand makes to this country’s wealth, Southland, and our other provinces, do not get anything like what they are entitled to from central government.

Southland has the highest exports per capita in this country.
New Zealand First knows full well the value of Southland and we are committed to its success and that of all New Zealand’s regions.

Looking around the world as we approach the end of 2015 one word sums up the overall outlook – uncertainty.

We are in uncertain times:

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• Dairy prices remain low with big questions over Fonterra’s forecast

• China’s economy and with it global growth is slowing

• Internationally, countries are deeply indebted

• The impact of international attitudes on climate change and especially the risk to New Zealand of an El Nino summer

• Then there is the Middle East, especially Syria and Iraq.

It is timely to consider the issue of resilience because only a resilient New Zealand will be ready to withstand the type of volatility, shocks and upheavals that may hit the global economy.

New Zealand First is worried that we have a government that shows little appreciation of possible risks and is not on track to build the sound economy we need.

Regional Policy

Several months ago Mr Fixit, Steven Joyce, came down here to size up Southland. When a local asked him to define the region's opportunities, he said “there are a number of promising food production possibilities” and some "more exploratory" ideas, “such as space projects”.
Maybe he was talking about the space between his ears because New Zealand First’s view, is that only with strong and diversified regional economies will New Zealand as a whole be resilient.

Over the past 7 years, not only has the government failed to make regional development a priority – worse – they have allowed Auckland’s issues to dominate policy and the media.

It is a travesty to see the media ignore Southland, including Radio NZ’s lack of an office here, while the end of CueTV broadcasts is a big blow to the voice of real New Zealand. New Zealand is now a tale of two economies; Auckland and the rest.

Auckland gets the lion’s share of government attention and resources.

Southland has a population of around 100,000 – Auckland has around 1.5 million.

As Auckland gobbles an increasing share of New Zealand’s resources in order to fix the self-inflicted pressures on housing, hospitals, schools and transport, it is Southland and our provinces that suffer.

The Auckland Property Bubble screams vulnerability not resilience.

The Reserve Bank keeps highlighting that the Auckland Property Bubble is a prime risk to New Zealand’s financial stability.

The Reserve Bank has now jacked up Auckland LVRs to 30 per cent, having failed with a nationwide LVR hike in provinces with no house price escalation at all. That policy was crude, mindless, and meaningless in effect - but they did it from Kaitaia to Bluff to try and fix Auckland’s house bubble.

And now, of course, if the bubble bursts all of New Zealand will suffer.

In contrast to National’s neglect, New Zealand First has a range of economic policies that will strengthen and build diversified provincial economies.

Per capita, Southland is the country's greatest export province, but much of that wealth is redirected out of the region.

And, as Venture Southland notes, every year Southland contributes $84 million more than it receives back in infrastructure funding in two key areas: roading and electricity.

Like Northland, Southland has some 3,600 kilometres of unsealed roads and hundreds of one-way bridges. We also have similarly poor broadband and voice mobile services.

That needs to change if we are to develop economically, but government takes more than it delivers. In short, for Southlanders they are fast on the lip and slow on the hip.

National talks up tourism but Southlanders pay for the roads while providing that iconic backdrop, and for what in return?

The solution is a fundamental change to how provincial New Zealand is funded, recognising our contribution to this country’s exports, be it tourism, dairy, forestry, meat or seafood.

Auckland and Wellington must recognise that the economy begins here and the only way you’ll get that message through is to follow Northland’s lead at the ballot box.

Here are just two of our essential policies for the regions.

First, reforming the Reserve Bank Act so that our currency settings reflect that New Zealand should be an export, production and more wealth, not a consumption and more debt, economy.

Second is our Royalties for the Regions policy. Under this, 25 per cent of Crown royalties from extractive industries will be kept in your region.

Primary Industries

Primary production is perhaps the key sector in Southland’s economy. It provides employment to one in eight Southlanders and for every three businesses here, one depends on the primary industries.

It is also an area where debate rages over the Southland Regional Council’s Water and Land plan.

While there’s undoubtedly an association between more cattle and the environment, it is more opaque than crystal clear. Something the 2015 Environment Aotearoa report bears out, with water clarity improving nationally, but nitrogen worsening.

We do not for one moment suggest sacrificing our natural environment for all things economic, but New Zealand First believes farming does New Zealand good.

That is why we are not convinced the Regional Council has got it right by going down what seems to be a punitive “grand parenting” route. There has to be a better way.

This is also where technology comes into play, yet Minister Joyce goes to the regions to pitch his regional research institutes like a tawdry gameshow host, but without the flair.

Government is making regions compete against each other, just as Jetstar did building hopes here only to dash them.

New Zealand First plans to boost research and development to 2% of GDP. Instead of closing Invermay in the south it would grow and we would see Crown Research Institutes based close to where their research is most needed. And Southland would not have to wait until 2017 for the Southern Dairy Hub either.

It is through research where the real solutions to climate and water lie. New Zealand First recognises the need to have a balanced economic approach to fund it.

This means realistic policy that balances economic development with sound environmental protection. More so, if we are to take full advantage of aquaculture in Southland and Stewart Island.

In the month of October alone, Norway exported 40 times the annual production of Big Glory Bay salmon farming. And over a single year, Norway exports more salmon by value than we do with sheep, lamb and beef.

New Zealand First is strongly committed to aquaculture and believes fish protein could be a New Zealand economic game changer. But it won’t happen with the inordinate costs of establishment now.

Manufacturing

With one in six jobs here dependent upon manufacturing, it is fantasy to suggest that New Zealand can have a resilient economy without a significant manufacturing base.

These days we do not hear so much empty talk about “the knowledge economy.”

With good reason – because making products actually matters.

The Tiwai Point Smelter is a case in point.

The smelter is of major economic significance to Southland and New Zealand as a whole - in terms of both direct and indirect jobs and exports

The smelter’s skilled management and workforce team are producing the highest-grade aluminum and it is also one of the world’s cleanest smelters because it runs on hydro-electricity.
Yet it is being run on the whim of Rio Tinto that is playing corporate hardball to get a fat $30m subsidy from the taxpayer then shortly after announcing billion dollar profits.

There isn’t time to deal with it today but Rio Tinto played this kind of hardball in the town of Nhulunbuy in Australia’s Northern Territory, and no self-respecting New Zealand Government should allow Rio Tinto to try a re-run of those sort of tactics in Southland.

NZ First is not a doctrinaire or ideological party – we prefer common sense.

That is why we believe a management/worker takeover of the Bluff aluminum smelter is the only sensible and long term solution. It is this outcome we would assist from central government.

If we taxpayers are paying the money it is we taxpayers that should be plucking the duck.

Leveraging off Tiwai comes manufacturing, building, light engineering and food processing. Especially with Edendale being amongst the largest dairy factories on earth.

And while making things matters, having a cooler climate and clean-green hydropower makes, Southland an ideal base for energy intensive ‘server farms’ or data warehouses.

You can be a part of the high-tech economy too.

Foreign Ownership

Yet we will not have the means to pay for research, hospitals and the like if we end up as cogs in someone else’s wheel. The potential loss of Silver Fern Farms into foreign ownership being a case in point.

National has resisted putting any effective control on foreign ownership of land, housing and strategic business assets.

And in a quite ostrich-like way, National has opposed collecting data so they can mislead the public by claiming “nothing to see here” and “trust us all is well”.

Just like the board of Silver Fern Farms and its multi-million dollar team of advisors National want the public, farmers and regulators to all look the other way.

Except there is something to see and New Zealand First increasingly believes that it represents a serious financial scandal.

This deal smells given Silver Fern Farms books appear to have been grossly understated on profit and grossly overstated on debt. If it is not challenged, it could easily become a template for the breakup of Fonterra and other co-operatively owned companies.

The implications go much wider than the Silver fern Farms deal.

Wholesale losses of our productive land to foreign buyers – and in the case of Chinese buyers their government – would deeply damage prospects for long term prosperity.

NZ First is committed to:

• Stopping the sale of our land to people who aren’t New Zealanders.
• Ensuring key export industry sectors remain in New Zealand hands
• Collecting accurate information on foreign ownership of land for the first time in New Zealand

Immigration Policy

This week the latest statistics were released showing another record level of immigration.

Predictably John Key boasted that this was a “cause for celebration.”

Really! One thing is certain – this government’s immigration policy does not pass the resilience test.

Why would any government that was putting the interests of its own citizens first allow record levels of immigration?
• unemployment is at 6 per cent and forecast to rise, that’s well over 150,000 Kiwis already without a job, or just one hour’s work a week, which is the current fictional criteria of being employed;
• most New Zealand workers have nearly static wages and salaries;
• immigrants are crowding into Auckland, a city in the throes of a housing bubble and where hundreds of families are already living in garages and even cars;
• every week brings new revelations of how overloaded and underfunded health and education services actually are.

As an aside for those who have watched this issue carefully, it is an irony how so many in the media use so much space to highlight these issues whilst never admitting that their support of mass immigration brought this problem about in the first. There’s a word for that, but since Christmas is near we are not going to use it.

The solution is not taxes, so beloved of the Left, or doing nothing, typical of National. The root cause is to get a grip on “runaway immigration”.

We need to turn the tap down and for the people we need, we’d require many of them to live in the regions for a number of years before they could go into the cities. And we’d see they do. Many of them will stay in the regions once they enjoy what these regions have to offer. There will be an end to the “rubber stamp immigration” National has put in place.

We need to develop Kiwis in farming and not those from somewhere else. Our community wage policy is about radically changing the signals sent by the benefits system so our young are work ready.

Instead of having the doors flung open, New Zealand First’s common sense policy is to put the interests of New Zealanders first

And how is allowing large numbers of unskilled or older people to enter NZ permanently benefiting New Zealand?

The answer is obvious – it is not.

And it is the people of Southland and the rest of New Zealand who are paying for them.

NZ First says a resilient immigration policy is one based on the skilled migrants we need – not National’s open door.

Conclusion

The outset of this speech referred to uncertain times and the need to build a resilient economy.

This is not a time for fantasy and fiction – or any more nonsense talk about “a rock star economy”.

One thing is certain however - Southland has a great future.
New Zealand First policies are realistic – common sense – down to earth – qualities many would say characterise Southlanders!

Our policies aim to create a resilient economy - because only a resilient economy ensures a secure and stable future for all New Zealanders.

ENDS

© Scoop Media

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