Speech by New Zealand First Leader and Member of Parliament for Northland Rt Hon Winston Peters
Public Meeting
Gore District Council
29 Civic Ave, Gore
1pm, Monday, 23rd May 2016

Southland is making it but not getting it

It is a pleasure to be back here in Gore, Southland and Heartland NZ.

It is an opportunity to reflect on what is happening to one of New Zealand’s great provinces and towns.

And to find an answer to a perplexing question, which is; “if Southland is New Zealand’s leading export province why is that not reflected in Southlands incomes, population’s growth and standard of living?”

Southland comprises about 3% of New Zealand’s population and contributes about 18% of New Zealand’s exports. That is a record no other New Zealand province can boast.

Southland should be New Zealand’s wealthiest province.

A political commentator once said that politics is about “who gets what, when, where and how”. How true that now seems in New Zealand.

Next Thursday Mr. English will present his eighth Budget. He used to be from Southland although you will know that he has not lived here for a long, long time. And the content of the 2016 Budget will reflect that.

It’ll be a Budget obsessed with Auckland issues. Pre occupied with a vain attempt to solve the problems resulting from record immigration mainly to Auckland.

It will attempt to address Auckland’s house price bubble and land-banking speculation. And trying to cope with massive health, education and infrastructure demands artificially created in New Zealand’s biggest city.

It will be a Budget attempting to maintain a standard of living underwritten by debt which alarmingly has increased eight-fold since his time as Finance Minister.

It’ll be a Budget playing off one group of New Zealanders against another – Auckland vs the Regions, and it will have this predictable feature – long on promises, some in to the very distant future, it will claim that we are back in surplus and some will applaud it as being sound economic management.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and if Southlanders take a good hard look at what has happened to them they will understand that.

Understand that the fundamentals behind our economy are extremely shaky and that Government boasting growth predictions are proving untrue with every passing month.

What you will certainly will not see in this Budget is the Prime Minister’s $3 billion tax cuts.

The gap between our cost of imports over returns for our exports will not be addressed, the decline in our manufacturing base will be ignored and there will not be any policies to deal with alarming rural debt.

In many ways the Gore district’s population decline reflects what is wrong with present Government policies.

From the small base of 13,500 20 years ago, it has fallen to 12,450 or by well over a 1000 people.

Whilst you have been served up a steady diet of how you must be part of the global economy great wealth has been stripped out of here and very little has been put back.

The National Party took you in to the Fonterra experiment which as late as last year was promising Southland farmers that it would be a “truly global co-operative by 2025”.

Meanwhile farmers here are trying to breathe with a snorkel and survive the next few years of what will not be a short term problem. Farmers, suppliers and contractors down here are all suffering.

Southland workers are almost 4 times more likely to work in dairy than New Zealanders overall.

Many farms here are in imminent threat of mortgagee sales.

In March Fonterra announced a massive half year profit of $409 million. This whilst the kilogram milk price was falling to $3.90.

And whilst Fonterra was making this huge profit they were cutting supplier and contract rates by 10 -20% while stretching the time to pay them from 30 to 90 days.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the top 19 people in Fonterra make $31 million per year whilst its Chief Executive is making about $4.9 million per annum, up over $770,000 on his 2014 pay package.

At the same time last year majority control of our number one meat company, Silver Fern Farms, was flogged off to Chinese Government owned Shanghai Mailing.

The financial information package given to farmers just before they voted was demonstrably false. The farmers voted for the deal and barely three weeks later the annual returns for Silver Fern Farms came out.

The annual returns show that senior management had understated Silver Ferns Farms income by a massive 82% and grossly exaggerated the company’s debt.

The issues are not complicated but the Chinese got majority control for a book entry $261 million in cash whilst getting a $139 million discount in return – in short, they are paying less than half of the true commercial value of the company.

All this happened with the coercion of a foreign bank, threatened impending liquidation, false accounts, and a truckload of public relations spin of just how good this was going to be for meat farmers.

Now the question for you is what has the National Party you have voted for all these years said or done about either Fonterra or Silver Ferns Farms?

The answer – not a syllable, not a sound, not a mutter, not a murmur out of them.

It is clear that there will be a legal challenge to this shonky deal but every National voter here today knows that their party and their MPs have not raised a single finger in protest at either the Fonterra debacle or the Silver Fern Farms scandal.

Earlier this year Invercargill Chinese owned Prime Range Meats shut their workers out. Not one National MP was available to comment or go to a planned meeting in protest.

Ladies and Gentlemen is that the level of representation you want in Wellington?

Should Gore be a training ground for boy MPs?

All you are going to hear out of them is criticism and attempted character assassination against anyone who dares to question their neutered performance.

Every year Southland contributes $84 million more than it receives back in infrastructure funding in just two major areas – roading and electricity.

Down here it’s long since time to take stock.

You just can’t go on accepting the language of ‘aspiration and opportunity’ when all around you observe aspirations and opportunities lost.

Southland has the resources and the people to be doing much better than it is, but it is not, like so many of our regions, getting a fair go.

In short, Southland is making it but not getting it.

Perhaps you should take a visit to Auckland. There you will observe the effects of record immigration, month on month, most going to Auckland and much of it screaming out for taxpayer resources.

Those resources are going to come from you or, where I come from, Northland.

In Auckland you will observe road gridlock for hours every day, the Auckland District Health Board complaining that they cannot meet demand for its services and every other service under stress.

You’ll hear of the massive housing shortage upon which they are piling up demand and people living in cars, garages and caravans.

No other country in the world is voluntarily taking our level of immigration and whilst it continues the needs of the provinces are going to be ignored. National will continue its consumptive, not productive, obsession with mass immigration and Auckland.

And low price tourism.

Down here so much of your tourism is based on people who want to visit New Zealand on $20 a day.

SDHB

Before this meeting we visited your hospital.

The staff there do a great job which no doubt you greatly appreciate.

However, it must be hard. They have to work in a system that is a mess.

New Zealand First wanted locally elected representatives to serve on the Southern District Health Board alongside the commissioner.
We believed local voices had to be heard.

Unfortunately our changes to the NZ Public Health and Disability (Southern DHB) Elections Bill were lost because National opposed them.

Earlier this year the government spent $26 million on a flag referendum to which the New Zealand pubic said no. Let’s stick to the current flag.

We all know this money could have been far better spent in our health sector.

The government blames district health boards for the problems in the health sector.

But the lack of money for health services goes straight to National’s meanness to the provinces.

There was no new money earmarked for rural health in the 2015 Budget.

All rural places such as Gore are told is cut – cut services, cut costs.

What we have got now in New Zealand is a two-tier health system with rural communities at the bottom.

The government’s policy of per capita funding for rural health is not working especially when you have populations that are both decreasing and aging.

New Zealand First Policies to help Southland

To help regions such as Southland, New Zealand First will reform the Reserve Bank Act so that New Zealand’s currency settings reflect that our economy is based on exports, not artificial consumption and more debt.

That means that every exporter will get considerably more than they are getting now from an overvalued currency that favours importers and not exporters.

And to those that argue against this proposition you should ask them how we can pay for our imports if we do not have sufficient export income.

New Zealand First wants a fair return of this Nation’s wealth to be returned to the regions that creates it.

You might be surprised to learn that Northland is in the top half of the exporting provinces and at the bottom of the income decile. You are at the very top of the export earning provinces but none of that is reflected in your income decile either.

In short, our economy and politics is upside down, and we are visiting all the provinces of this country to turn them the right way up.
New Zealand First would introduce our Royalties for Regions (RFR) scheme.

This policy would see a minimum of 25 per cent of royalties collected by the Government from enterprises such as mining, water extraction and petroleum, to name just some, stay in the region where the enterprise is located.

As an example, in 2011 the government collected $383 million in royalties.

Under our scheme $96 million annually would remain in the regions for investment. That money – nearly a hundred million would be used to regenerate regional New Zealand. This ensures the regions get a fair share of the wealth they generate. This is a key to our policy.

The revenue would be held in a special purpose investment fund administered by the relevant regional council, and used for a wide range of infrastructure projects, building new health facilities, creating new play areas for children, or improving water treatment plants and restoring New Zealand’s environment.

We would write off student loans in areas where there are critical regional shortages. Graduates spending 5 years in such a programme would have their student loan written off. After 5 years many of them will want to stay in that region.

New Zealand First’s immigration policy will mean that we will bring in people we need not people who need us which is so much the case now in Auckland.

We will maximise points for those who are prepared to go to the provinces.

That is uniquely our policy and on this issue every other party is tainted by their record.

We will introduce real research and development incentives with proactive taxation policies to help rural New Zealand.

New Zealand First is going to ensure that it is our young people who provide the human resources needed in our provinces.

We do not agree with Mr. English’s comment that when it comes to farming too many of our young people are ‘useless’.

Conclusion

Ensuring regions get their fair share of the wealth they generate is a key New Zealand First policy.

Southland will get the respect it rightly deserves.

Right now almost half of Cabinet come from Auckland and the Government’s policies reflect that.

We’re different to National and their coalition partners.

New Zealand First believes in positive policies to stimulate the regions not sitting in Wellington and listening to a highly paid bureaucracy waiting for something to happen, or not, as the case may be.

With New Zealand First Southland will regain its voice.

ENDS

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