Brash vows to cut 'nanny-state'

Don Brash

Labour has "squandered the golden years" with its "wastefulness and poor management", and New Zealanders are now paying the price, says National Party leader Don Brash.

Speaking at the party's national conference in Picton today, Dr Brash said in the seven months since National "nearly won" the election, the Labour-led Government's roading plan had fallen apart, hospital waiting lists were out of control, and the prison system was on the verge of breaking down.

"The evidence of Labour's failure is all around us, and that's without factoring in their wastefulness and poor management of government services."

For the last seven years, Prime Minister Helen Clark and her Government had done "nothing at all to build on the fantastic legacy left to them by the reforms of the previous 15 years", and pretended that the growing budget surpluses were the result of their fiscal prudence.

"Worse than that, she's squandered the ever-growing taxes paid in by hardworking taxpayers on poorly-focused programmes that are badly run and badly managed, to the point where even some of her own ministers realise they can't just keep tipping good money after bad....

"She's squandered the golden weather created by strong export prices."

If present policies continued, New Zealand did "not have a snowball's chance in hell of closing the income gap with Australia" nor getting into the top half of the OECD within 30 years.

Dr Brash said Helen Clark and Finance Minister Michael Cullen would be leaving behind "a terrible legacy of poor incentives and dependency".

"They'll leave a mess of poorly-thought-out and politically opportunistic tax and income support policy, which will unfortunately cost all New Zealanders dearly in the years ahead."

While he said he could not divulge at this stage "precisely" what tax reductions National would propose, he could definitely promise lower taxes.

He also touched on the need to "accelerate" Treaty of Waitangi settlements.

"It's tragic that policy in New Zealand is ensnared in the strange ideological obsessions of the Labour Party -- ideological obsessions which are utterly obsolete internationally."

- NZPA