DAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Thank you, Mr Speaker. And as I listened to James Shaw, the leader of the Green Party, give his speech, I was reminded of one of those America's Cup races where someone sails across the line before the gun goes off. It is not time to start talking about what ideological flavour of recovery this country should have but to talk about having a recovery.
And what the Minister of Finance is proposing is to have the ability to spend $52 billion. Let's put that in some perspective. That is as much as all the tax paid by every household and business in New Zealand for a year. It is as much as all of the value produced by the whole country working for two whole months. It amounts to borrowing $10,000 for every single person, from newborn to centenarians, in this country. The interest, in current favourable terms, is about $200 per year per person; but, who knows, if interest rates return to historic norms, it's $600 a year in interest for every single person at normal interest rates.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it, but it does mean that if we're going to spend $52 billion, we should do it right. Some questions that the Government might want to ask itself, and this Parliament should ask, are: is this initiative that the Government is spending money on going to help us get to a COVID-19 recovery? It should be directly related to the goal, not trying to put in a kind of structural change that the Labour Party might otherwise want. That's why the changes to benefits were a mistake.
Another question is: will it help businesses keep together? As the recovery eventually comes, we need the nexus of skills and relationships and capital that make up businesses—whether it is the pizza joints on Manukau Road in Auckland or a much bigger business, it needs to be able to stick together. A suggestion on that for the Minister of Finance: he has got, I think, a very good scheme negotiated with the banks to help businesses struggling with credit—that's a good initiative. It works for those customers of the four big Aussie banks, but there are smaller local banks whose customers, for the most part, have less than $250,000 turnover, and they don't qualify. I think that that should be addressed.
People have been messaging me, I know, talking about personal protective equipment (PPE). They've seen videos from around the world, where all manner of people have much better PPE than even some healthcare workers—people in pharmacies who are on the front line of this crisis right now. A major priority for spending this money should be getting PPE in place.
The scheme to compensate workers—$585 for a full-time worker—is not a bad idea, but it's pretty blunt; it's pretty one-size-fits-all. I'd commend to the Minister of Finance—looking at what the New Zealand Initiative has proposed—copying the successful German policy out of the GFC: short-time work, where businesses that have to shrink their volume—say, a tourist business that's had a serious reduction in volume—have the ability to lay off workers and have a percentage of their wages paid by the Government for the interim. It allows them to scale up, it allows them to scale down, it keeps the businesses in place so that they can actually get back into business when there is a recovery. That's the kind of practical thinking that we need over the coming weeks as this Minister of Finance attempts to spend $52 billion, but, hopefully, not all of it.
Finally, there must be an increase in testing. I accept that there are practical constraints on how many tests can be done, but one of the most important things New Zealand can do in order to ensure that we get on top of this crisis is test, test, test. That is a place where this $52 billion—not all of it—should allow us to be among the leading testers in the world. We should be testing like South Koreans.
I want to finish by thanking all of those people—those people in supermarkets, those people in hospitals, many of whom have become front-line essential workers for reasons not of their own choosing. I think all of us as New Zealanders should have our thoughts with them today. Thank you very much, Mr Speaker, and good luck to Grant Robertson.
Bill read a second time.