AN OPEN LETTER TO BILL ENGLISH RESPONDING TO HIS CHALLENGE RE “TRANSFORMATIONAL” ECONOMIC GROWTH The Kiwi Party
Press Release
21 May 2011
Dear Bill,

At Friday morning’s ANZ Budget Breakfast, you challenged the 350 or so attendees to let you know if they had any big ideas which would have a transformational potential for the New Zealand economy, “because we haven’t”.

Well we have good news for you Minister because we have and here are a few of them.

1. Irrigate the whole of the Canterbury plains. Eighty-five percent of the water which flows in the rivers across those plains ends up in the ocean! Keith Turner former Meridian CEO will tell you how to do it and you could fund it by a relatively small investment by government supplemented by private investment and borrowings against future cash flow. The increase in productivity would be enormous (we mean billions every year) and we could supply vegetables to the world if that’s where the demand lay.

2. Build new houses. We are about 30,000 short at the moment and have fallen well off the pace. Deregulate and make more land available for housing. Spread infrastructures costs more widely across the community and give couples a 50% GST refund when they build a new home. This could easily inject another $6 billion a year into the NZ economy, create thousands of new jobs, boost tax revenue and best of all, see more kiwi families become home owners, by reducing the cost of a new house by $10’s of thousands. And don’t say we don’t have the work force to do it because there are thousands of unemployed young people out there just waiting to be trained.

3. Get mining humming. It only needs 0.7% of the Conservation Estate (much of which is hardly of National Park quality), to get $100 billion industry under way. Add in coastal iron sands and environmentally friendly lignite mining and it could be double that or more.

4. Reverse family breakdown by re-building a marriage culture. Why shouldn’t more families be like yours? David Cameron in the UK is on to this because the evidence throughout history and internationally, makes it clear that it is transformational both economically and socially. The savings - which admittedly will take a while to kick in -will be enormous with the cost of family breakdown in NZ estimated to be somewhere between $6 billion (the DPB alone is $3 billion a year), and $15 billion a year.

How is that for starters Minister?

For the sake of New Zealand.

Yours sincerely,

Larry Baldock, Leader, and Gordon Copeland, President.

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