Media celebrity and now politician Paul Henry was in Invercargill on Wednesday part of his unlocked tour. He hosted a meeting and chat. Here is his full speech.
I'm standing, the New Zealand I'm looking at is not as good, it's not as positive, it doesn't offer the same things that I was offered when I was growing up. New Zealand, as many people in this room would know, was once a true country of aspiration, of pioneers, people who built things, people who took risks, people who got on with the job. ACT, I believe, is the only party capable of restoring that spirit.
Here's what ACT believes in a nutshell. ACT believes every New Zealander should have equal rights under the law. We believe taxpayers' money should be respected, success should be encouraged rather than treated with suspicion.
People should be free to build, invent, work, invest, raise families without needless, time-consuming and expensive interference. The word we believe in at ACT is freedom and freedom should be fun. New Zealanders, we believe, should be safe in their homes, workplaces and communities.
There is no point encouraging people to take risks and build something if crime can destroy it in an instant. We believe we should have world-class services in this country. Teachers, doctors, nurses, firefighters, police should be paid world-class salaries.
It is to me completely unacceptable that a police officer in Auckland today can resign, go to Sydney, get a job straight away, earning one-third more and working one day less a week. That is unacceptable. That's the situation we're in right now.
And we all know that nurses, I actually have my eldest daughter, Lucy, is an oncology nurse at Peter Mac in Melbourne. She was headhunted from Auckland hospital where she was doing 60 to 70 hours a week. They headhunted her, she went over there and was paid exactly the same salary for two days a week.
You just can't compete. I'll tell you another reason why she loves it over there and I wouldn't ask her back yet. It's because she tells me she saves lives that she couldn't save in New Zealand and I'll talk more about that a little bit later.
We believe at ACT that those that truly can't look after themselves should be cared for with confidence and compassion and those that can should be strongly encouraged to do so. Do you know in the last 12 months the government spent of your money, because the government has none of its own money, it only has your money, the government spent just under 850 million dollars trying to encourage people into work. At the same time we spent just over 24 billion dollars paying people not to work.
That is unsustainable. Okay, here's what ACT is not. There are many political parties in New Zealand, too many, let's not get any extra ones in, okay, if anyone's got any ideas.
ACT can say three things that no other party can say. One, we are not Labour. Two, we have never worked with Labour.
And three, and this is the important one to think about tonight, we are not Labour-lite. Labour and the Greens believe almost every problem can be solved with more tax, more spending, more borrowing, more red tape. New Zealand First has worked with Labour before and could do so again.
Remember Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern came to us courtesy of Winston. National is plainly preferable to Labour, but you know what, without ACT its instinct is to tread too softly, to avoid rocking the boat, looking over their shoulder rather than have their eyes firmly fixed on the prize. ACT supplies direction, urgency and spine to National.
The courage to make the right decision rather than the easy decision. ACT stood alone against rushed firearms laws. The unachievable Zero Carbon Act.
ACT was the only party that voted against that. And of course our policy now is to ditch it completely. We also voted against misplaced earthquake strengthening laws that cost billions without saving lives.
ACT is in government driving change. Nowhere near as far or fast as ACT would like, but I promise you much further and faster than would have happened if it weren't for ACT at the table. Here's what we know, and none of this is me making it up.
In fact, I should have told you right at the beginning, the thing about me is I'm a bloody genius. Um, so you don't need to second guess anything I say. This is all absolute fact.
Here is what we know. Prosperity is not a mystery. A country cannot borrow, tax or regulate itself into prosperity.
There is no example of that being successful anywhere in the world. And it certainly can't achieve prosperity by dividing its citizens into competing racial groups. We are in this together.
ACT will add three principles to our Governing Constitution Act, affirming the basic values that one, Parliament is sovereign. Two, the rule of law is fundamental. And three, New Zealanders are all equal before the law.
To achieve prosperity, thank you. I'm saying thank you. It's their thing.
I'm just a candidate. To achieve prosperity, I actually said it humble. To achieve prosperity, wealth has to be created by someone taking a risk.
This is the only way we get money. Someone taking a risk, starting a business, solving a problem, investing, employing people, hospitals, schools, roads, pensions, all of the things we use, ultimately paid for just by New Zealanders who get out of bloody bed in the morning, go to work, take risks, produce something that other people want. That's where the money comes from.
Before politicians can redistribute the pie, someone has to bake the bloody thing. Here's what ACT has already achieved. And if there's one thing ACT is really bad at, they're really good at knuckling down.
They're really bad at singing their own praises. This has been a really busy year for Todd and the other members of Parliament that we have. These are some of the things, just some little grab bag of things that we've achieved.
ACT said public services should be delivered according to need, not race. We will double down on that next term. We scrapped the Maori Health Authority and divised three waters.
We restored referendums on Maori wards and put child safety rather than race at the centre of Oranga Tamariki. We started a national conversation, actually you may have heard something about this, got some media coverage, about our nation's founding document. It was a spectacular failure in terms of the vote.
We lost the vote, as I say, spectacularly, but we won the debate. We were let down by coalition partners when only ACT voted in favour of equal rights. That is political bravery.
We are far from done in that space. On the economy, ACT saved the budget, not once but twice. First by restoring cents to pay equity laws that no one up until that point would be able to understand anyway.
And then by securing the Government's adoption of ACT's plan to reduce the public service to 2017 levels, albeit two years later than ACT would have started. You know, the public service grew by 34% from 2017 levels, thanks to two terms of labour. And when we suggested that we go back, when we released the policy, go back to 2017, there were probably too many public servants in 2017, but you've got to draw the line somewhere.
When we suggested that, so many parties said, oh God, what will they do? What will they do for a living? You know, what they were actually saying is, it's okay that we have a hugely expensive job creation scheme that we call Government. We have got to look after your money more carefully. We have got to reduce the size of Government, the size of bureaucracy.
And do you know what we will do by freeing those people up? Sounds wonderful, doesn't it? Well, I just wanted to have a word with you, we're going to free you up. What we're going to do, because some of those people will be great people, we're going to put those people, we're going to put those people as an asset to the private sector. And they will be able to earn money in the private sector, and thus they will be able to help build the economy, rather than stifling the economy by doing jobs that are unnecessary, writing reports that shouldn't be written for people who shouldn't read them, and tying everyone in this room, and sadly everyone out of it up in red tape.
That is what is stifling our economy. We cut red tape facing farmers, we slashed methane targets, we halted new SNAs, we secured the replacement of the Resource Management Act that is all going through now, and pushed through wider reforms to make it easier to build and invest. ACT truly champions your property rights and always will.
In public services, ACT brought back charter schools and forced government to focus on whether children attend school and learn. As a result of actually calling for some accountability there, the most recent attendance figures are the best turned to results since 2016 for attendance. How good do you reckon they are? Where do you reckon they might be? I reckon they might be at 80%, 85%, 62% of children regularly attend school.
That's appalling. And that's the best it's been since 2016. It's got a long way to go.
Pharmac has made 135 decisions to fund or widen access to medications, including 47 cancer medications, with more than 360,000 people set to benefit from that in the first year. And the most important area that I want to mention, that this is my view anyway, that a government's first priority is to protect its citizens. Three strikes has been restored, Labour's prison reduction target has gone, sentencing has been strengthened, and most importantly, the focus is now firmly on supporting victims rather than commiserating with offenders.
Never again do I want a victim of crime to sit in court and hear some bloody wowser come on about the terrible life, the sad life that the person that's wrecked their life has had. That to me is offensive. So what does that mean? There are around 46,000 fewer victims of violent crime now than there were in 2023.
Serious and persistent offending by children and young people is down 25%. Again, there's a long way to go. But here's the inconvenient trip.
So great stuff's happened. Hasn't happened fast enough, hasn't gone far enough, there's a long way to go, but great stuff's happened. But the warning lights are flashing.
New Zealand is still paradise. You just have to go out. I mean, today, I experienced paradise firsthand.
It was just so good to get out of Auckland. But you know, it's such a true line. But paradise is not guaranteed.
The warning lights are flashing. The inconvenient truth. Debt is rising.
Too many productive New Zealanders are still leaving the country because they think they have to to get ahead. Productivity is weak. Government spends too much and delivers too little.
It is often an obstacle to growth rather than a hand up, making it just too difficult to build a house, start a business, hire someone, invest or consent infrastructure. Today, we need $24,500,000. The government will get it from you because you're the only people with money.
But unfortunately, we've such a dry. So we're going to borrow it. $24.5 million we need today.
We needed it tomorrow just to pay the interest on the money we already own. And that's not quite enough to keep the ship afloat. We need another $14 million a day to keep New Zealand on a level keel.
$38 million a day we add to our borrowing. We add to our debt, which is knocking on the door of $200 billion. It is completely unsustainable.
We have become a country that consumes the achievements of previous generations without building enough for the next generation. New Zealand was built, as I said before, by pioneers, people who crossed oceans, farmed hilly scrub, built businesses, invented stuff and created a home a long way away from the rest of the world. We didn't become prosperous because of some natural right to prosperity.
We became prosperous because people did difficult shit. And other people saw them do it and they thought I could do that too. I could reap the rewards of doing that.
And together, we built this country. We need to become that country again. This election could reverse all of the benefits, all of the progress that we've made could be reversed so quickly.
Has the government gone as far as ACT would have gone on our own? Nowhere near. Coalition government means effecting as much change as your numbers allow. What we do absolutely know is this government has gone much further and faster than it would have without ACT at the table.
Make no mistake though, things could get much worse very quickly. You sometimes hear people say, I've heard people say it, you know, why don't we give them a go? It couldn't be any worse than what we've got. Don't let that thought creep into the minds of anyone you ever talk to.
My god, it could be worse. The political left is openly promising more spending, more taxes, wealth taxes, the most evil tax of all because that is a tax on money you haven't made, you haven't seen, you maybe won't ever make it. Capital gain taxes, higher income taxes, and more supposedly free schemes they're offering paid for by people whose money apparently materialises without effort, without sacrifice, without risk.
They just want to give it all away. Let me be clear, ACT says no to all those taxes. The aim is to lower taxes and simplify the tax structure when it is possible to do so.
I am particularly keen on seeing the corporate rate lowered so we can be more competitive, so that businesses in the area, you lower the corporate rate, they're not going to go out and buy a Rolls-Royce, they're going to invest that money in their business. The government cannot grow the economy. All the government can do is provide a great platform and then get out of the way so that private enterprise can grow the economy.
So here's the real choice at this election. Do we return to the belief that prosperity can be announced, borrowed, redistributed, or do we become a country that encourages and then rewards the people who create prosperity? There are two things we need to do at this election. First, we need to lock Labour, the Greens and Te Pati Maori out of power.
Secondly, and more importantly, we need to unlock New Zealand's potential. Locking Labour out prevents things from getting worse. Unlocking New Zealand's potential is how we make things so much better.
ACT, I believe, is the only party that offers both. These last three years have been a nudge in the right direction. What we need now is a lurch and I promise you that is what I will work towards, the ACT team will work towards.
We can't win on November 7th and then sit back and congratulate ourselves for months. We have to move and move quickly. Now I'm not touring this country because I need the exercise, although I have put on just a tiny bit of weight, and I'm not doing it because I think New Zealand is doomed.
I wouldn't bother if I thought New Zealand was doomed, quite the opposite. I'm doing it because this country is magnificent. We are educated, inventive, resourceful and surrounded by extraordinary natural advantage.
We split the atom. We created conductive plastic. We surrounded animals with electric wire and now with wireless collars.
We launch satellites for NASA and bunches of balloons for the world's children. We build billion-dollar companies. We just aren't proud enough of it.
We don't sing those praises. We don't inspire the next generation with what they can do and that is what we have to do. The next generation should be dreaming bigger.
When ACT says it will build a world-class national cancer centre, rather than the media and opposition parties trying to find reasons why it won't work, and we didn't just pluck this out of thin air, this is gold standard globally, what they should have done is celebrated a real advancement in health outcomes, saving over a thousand lives a year and vastly improving the quality of life for many thousands more. I mentioned a while ago Lucy is over there because she does, you know, gets the same amount of money for just two days a week, but I said that the key reason that I wouldn't ask her to come back, she wouldn't come back, is not the money, it's the fact as she said she can save lives over there she couldn't save here. Do you know what the number is? It's almost 1,100 New Zealanders a year die of cancer just because they've got cancer in New Zealand.
If they were in Australia, they wouldn't die. I mean that is so unacceptable. Five million people have the capacity right here, I believe, right now, to build one of the wealthiest, safest and most envied countries on earth, but potential has to be unlocked.
That requires political coverage, courage, a willingness to tell the truth and a population that still believes as I do and ACT does, that tomorrow can be better than today. New Zealand is absolutely paradise. It is time to celebrate our achievements and save the future.
Thank you very much. Oh, I'll tell a story about Peter Beck. I've got a quick story about Peter Beck.
I mean I interviewed him when he was quite young. He was starting out and he was this precocious guy and he said, I'm going to launch