Q+A
 
PANEL DISCUSSIONS
 
HOSTED BY PAUL HOLMES
 
PAUL HOLMES
The panel this morning is Dr Raymond Miller from Auckland University, and the former ACT MP and minister Heather Roy, now chair of the pharmaceutical lobby group Medicines New Zealand, and we also have with us the head of the UNITE union and the Herald on Sunday columnist Matt McCarten. Well, does either of those two men have the ideas?
 
HEATHER ROY - former ACT Deputy Leader
No, I don’t think they do. I was hoping for something bold in this budget. One measure would have done it for me, and that would have been superannuation. Bill English said it’s going to take 15 years to get any change, but you’ve got to start planning for the future now.
 
DR RAYMOND MILLER - Political Scientist
That’s right. That’s an argument, really, for announcing it right now. The point is, I think, that they’ve made the promise. They don’t want to back away from that promise. 20% of all voters are over the age of 65. 40% are over the age of 50. They’re concerned about electability. Many of those people, of course, are going to be voting National. They’re just- Leadership is all about, you know, it’s not about popularity only. It’s also about being fair and reasonable.
 
PAUL          But when we talk about the costs of super, that’s really a cost-saving measure, isn’t it? Where’s what’s going to address the exports? Exports drive this country. We’ve had a 17% decline in the value of exports in the last six months.
 
MATT MCCARTEN – UNITE Union
Yeah, they’re not going to do it. The problem- Where we come to a consensus is these guys don’t work because they believe in the same model - the free market will fix it. What do they do about the exporting? They don’t know. So somehow they say, ‘Oh well, it’ll kind of work out.’ And so we do get distracted on superannuation. The truth is that superannuation is affordable. And what Labour says, let’s move it. So working people have gotta work longer, but they don’t address, if they wanna be honest about it, you’ve got a number of MPs, enormous amount of people are still working and getting super. Then they go on about the KiwiSaver, make that compulsory, which is actually gonna take the place of pensions by the time the kids get to that age.
 
RAYMOND
I think that’s a really important point, and really what Shane was talking about     was this intergenerational fairness. $3.5 billion more it’ll cost for superannuation in four years’ time. If there was more that went into growth amongst the young, a sense of optimism, you know, in terms of employment, in terms of curing problems like child poverty, there are many opportunities that are there for a government that really is prepared to recognise this intergenerational fairness issue.
 
PAUL           What about this issue with Australia? How serious do you regard it?
 
MATT          Well, it was a few months ago we had a discussion here, remember, when the Reserve Bank Governor came and said we’re never gonna catch up with Australia. ‘Course, all the politicians huffed and puffed. ‘This is outrageous. This is our policy. We’re going to catch up with Australia.’ Well, it seems the irony is we’re exporting our kids to Australia so they can get Australian wages. There is no answer None of them have got any answers. It’s all very vague - ‘Oh, you know, if we tinker around.’ That’s because we don’t have any growth responsibility by the state. We’ve given it up.
 
PAUL           That’s another thing about the budget. Where is the big idea to turn the country into another direction? Obviously we need a new direction.
 
RAYMOND
                      Well, it is an accounting exercise, really, and this is part of the problem. And if we keep going over the next five years the way we’ve done this last year with Australia, we’ll be losing a city the size of Wellington, and this is a really serious problem.
 
PAUL           It’s a really serious problem. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call it a diaspora. I mean, it’s an exodus. 53,000 people last year.
 
HEATHER 
                      It is a lot, but you need to also look at who those people are. Is it our best and brightest? Is it not? We want our young people to travel. That’s always been a proud New Zealand tradition, but we want them to come back. Unless we’ve got strong economic growth, good jobs for them to come back to and opportunity, they’re not going to come back.
 
MATT          But, look, the new right and Heather’s ideology, they’ve had the reins for this for 30 years, and now we’ve actually got what they want. Kids are going. We’re going to be a tourist outfit for the world, and that’s now our future. Neither of those two parties put anything up about growth. It’s all about cutting, cutting. I mean, to be fair, Labour is starting to try and address it, but nothing concrete It’s, ‘Oh, well, let’s save more’. What does that mean?
 
PAUL           I don’t know. That apparently helps the exporter as he walks down the street in Shanghai.
 
MATT          Well, 17% drop this year.
 
PAUL           Yes, I know. Can I just go back to this Australia thing, though? I heard a frightening thing the other night. You know, after the budget the students were blockading Symonds Street. I don’t know why, but they were.
 
MATT          In protest against the student loan restrictions, yeah.
 
PAUL           Yes, the rise from 10-
 
MATT          To 12, and in Australia it’s 4% after $60,000, and after $19,000 you pay 12% in this country, and then you say, ‘What sort of message-‘ And then you’ve got the paper run thing and you say, ‘What message is that sending to young people’?
 
PAUL           Well, stay on the students, because he says, ‘Well, because of the 12%, now I’ve got no option but to stay in Australia.’ And so we’ve got this benign student loan scheme now being used as a weapon by students to-
 
MATT          Well, the generations who made decisions to bring these loans in actually got it from the taxpayer and didn’t actually have a loan, so we’ve privatised education, and now we’re privatising the super, then we hit the pay packets. What message does it send? ‘Course they’re gonna go. Anyone with half a brain is out of this country.
 
RAYMOND
                      I think to be fair to the government the signs of innovation initiatives are very encouraging, but part of the problem is a lot of that money comes out of the students, not just in terms of the speed of paying back student loans, but also post-graduate study, because allowances are being removed for students who are going into post-graduate study. So where is the knowledge economy? Where is the growth there?
 
PAUL           And I think that it was stated the other day that we’re gonna have 600 more engineers, and I thought, great for the mining industry.
 
MATT          Exactly. But here’s the thing, right - with the student loans, they only go up to four years. So anyone who wants to do post-graduate and comes from a poor family, there’s no chance.
 
PAUL           Steven Joyce covered that off and said there’s no difference. But listen, going back to this business of holding the government to account. I mean, they’re saying it’s not necessarily a failure that when they came in it was the Westpac Stadium going - 35,000. Now it’s 53,000. No one’s holding the government to account.
 
MATT          No, it’s all vague. The best we can come up with - ‘Oh, we like to see them travel.’ As we’ve just said, the difference is they’re not coming back.
 
RAYMOND
                      The sad thing about it all, really, is there’s nothing inspirational in this budget that would cause people to read it and say, ‘I’m gonna stay here.’
 
HEATHER
                      That’s right. There’s got to be a reason for people to stay or a reason for people to come back. That comes back to prudent fiscal management and strong economic growth.
 
MATT          It’s tinker and hope.
 
PAUL           Tinker and hope, yes. That’s a very good thing - there’s no inspiration. People need inspiration and hope, don’t they?
 
 
PAUL           You’re back with Q+A and the final panel - Raymond Miller, Heather Roy and Matt McMarten. How dangerous were that crowd?
 
MATT          Well, on the day, when you see the TV, you think, ‘Wow, what’s going on here?’ And then they mention that the terrorist cell leader is Tame Iti, and then you realise - is this a joke?
 
HEATHER 
                      Yes, looking at those drills, I don’t think they’d have got me through my army basic training. But we have to remember- I’ve got a slightly different take on this, maybe, from others. Remember that at that time the police were operating under the Terrorism Suppression Act, and the state had actually had huge power bestowed on it, and when you do that you actually need checks and balances in place. Then the solicitor general came in and said, ‘This isn’t treason’-
 
PAUL           Having first of all apparently said, ‘Yes, you can use the act.’
 
HEATHER 
                      That’s right. Then it went to the Crimes Act, and then it ended up being charges under the Arms Act. Now, should New Zealanders be allowed to run around with unlicensed weapons and Molotov cocktails? Absolutely not. And so that’s where we’ve got to now. It was a comedy of errors, and nobody comes out of this looking any good at all.
 
RAYMOND
                      But the thing is that they’d been monitoring their behaviour for 18 months. Now, surely if there was such a danger they could have moved in long before that. They allowed the leader of the opposition to go in and be vulnerable there. I mean, it seems very strange. They went on this fishing expedition, basically, to try and find out what they could. Having monitored for 18 months, they should have known who the people were. The other thing that really concerns me is that, you know, we live in a democracy, and here is the Minister of Police-
 
PAUL           The Commissioner of Police.
 
RAYMOND
                      Yes, but the Minister of Police is not being adequately informed the night before. Now, he says it’s an operational matter. The politicians- the buck stops with them. They have to actually answer for the behaviour of the police. I think that, you know, he was extremely dismissive of the Minister of Police and the role she played as accountable-
 
PAUL           Annette King was adamant at the time that this was not what she was briefed on, that this was well beyond the scale of what she’d been briefed upon.
 
MATT          It’s been a farce from start to finish. As you say, no one is covered in glory in this. Anyone with an IQ above average knows exactly what went on.
 
PAUL           Well, tell me, because I’m a bit slow.
 
MATT          OK, Tame Iti is an icon. This is up in the Ureweras in the Tuhoe. There’s a history there. Young kids from Wellington go up there for trips. They do Maoritanga. Part of it was out in the bush. Everyone in the Tuhoe’s got guns. The guy who went to jail, all the guns there were licenced. There were four which weren’t. Rangi’s were licenced. They went out and had a bit of a shoot round. We’re not talking about Molotov cocktails. We’re talking Coke bottles, one, with petrol in it, and they threw it. They talked stuff. Anyone who’s had kids or been to the pub knows that you talk politics and you do things. But here’s the seriousness of the raid. I think they’ve watched too much American TV. There were raids on the same day in Aro Valley in Wellington, where a number of them were picked up. Any roadblocks there? No. Knocked on the door, ‘Can you come with us, please? Get your bags.’ It was different. That’s the thing. One last thing. Tame Iti, when he got arrested, the great ‘terrorist’, was allowed to go to Paris, not on the terrorist watchlist, and go on a holiday around the art galleries in Europe. That’s the level of-
 
PAUL           The Police Commissioner was dismissive of the story about the school bus, kohanga reo bus, having ninjas jump on the bus, but here’s what the bus driver told us at the time.
 
---CLIP---
 
BUS DRIVER
I was one of the drivers. They did hop on our bus and they did search our bus.
REPORTER
                      How many police hopped on the bus?
 
DRIVER      One Kotahi.
 
REPORTER
                      Was he armed?
 
DRIVER      Yes, he was. He had a- They always held their rifles.
 
---END OF CLIP---
 
PAUL           So who do you believe, I suppose? And that’s on the day. You believe the witness on the day, don’t you?
 
RAYMOND
                      I still do think an apology is in order, and quite frankly, that was the most half-hearted attempt at an apology from the Commissioner. If people really were upset - and it seems that there is plenty of evidence that they were - then there is no harm in the police going in and actually apologising.
 
PAUL           Well, who was he apologising to? He’s talking about the innocent people, isn’t he, he’ll apologise to.
 
MATT          Of course. He goes on as if somehow he’s been asked to apologise to the defendants. No one’s asked for that. See, what they’re doing is they can’t admit they botched up from day one. All this Terrorism Act, it all got thrown out, so it’s firearm charges. Tame and his mate were always going to jail because the establishment now has to actually not just send them to jail, has to prove the whole thing’s- That’s why they went to jail. And your case about the Rena - 7 months, 2 ½ years, - says exactly what this is about. Who’s done more damage to this country?
 
HEATHER
                      I think you also need to remember that the Terrorism Suppression Act was there and bestowed huge power on the state, which allowed the police to think they had the right to go in. And so it’s not just the police who are responsible. The politicians putting in place the legislation also need to be held to account.
 
PAUL           And there I’ve gotta leave it. Thank you all very much, panel – Raymond Miller, Heather and Matt McCarten.
 
MATT          We’re waiting for an arrest for the Pike River. The Commissioner can get on to that now.
 
PAUL           Yes.

ENDS