Introduction

Thank you Beth and thank you to our wonderful ACT Party volunteers and President. Did you know our online donations averaged a thousand dollars per day for the hundred days before the election was called? ACT has its best momentum and support in a decade.

I want to thank Sang Cho and the team at Eden Bistro for opening up especially in Waitangi. Eden Bistro is a new business, and I think it’s going to be a big success. Here in the north of Mt Eden is one of the Epsom Electorate’s most exciting up-and-coming neighbourhoods.

Many people here are from the Epsom Electorate. I’m proud to represent you as your local MP. This month marks six years since I started my campaign to represent Epsom in 2014. This year I will be campaigning anew for my neighbours to send me to Wellington for a third time.

The state of Our Nation is strong. We are a democracy with a diversified free market economy. We have a rich civil society with voluntary organisations of every kind.

We saw in the aftermath of our nation’s tragedy in Christchurch that we may be the warmest people on earth. We are lively, entrepreneurial people who moved further than anyone for a better tomorrow.

We live on the greatest piece of physical real estate on earth.

The State of our Nation is strong. Our strength has been built up by generations. The question we need to ask ourselves is: Are we adding to or subtracting from the legacy we inherited up until today?

I want to talk about some issues we face as a country.

Erosion of Rights and Freedoms

Free Speech

The number one political issue is the erosion of freedom under this Government. The foundational freedom of any free society if freedom of speech. It is a good place to start.

The ACT Party says it’s a sacred right to think our thoughts and share our views. Freedom of speech allowed Galileo to say the Earth goes around the Sun. It allowed Kate Shephard to say Women have equal rights. Every chance of a better tomorrow depends on people thinking and speaking freely.

The current Government thinks free speech is dangerous. It doesn’t want you involved in planning tomorrow. If you are allowed to just think whatever you want, you might think the wrong thing!

That’s why they want so called hate speech laws. Someone, somewhere, will be employed by you to decide what you can say. If that sounds nuts, it is. But don’t blame me, I’m just describing their proposal honestly.

Normally when the state comes after you, you’re allowed to defend yourself with facts. You can’t be convicted of theft if you didn’t actually take something. When charged with hate speech, no fact can come to your defence. The question is simply whether you said something unpopular, it is mob rule at its worst.

It gets worse. Imagine a job that lets you punish the unpopular. Who would apply? Bad people, of course. The worst. We already have a guy called Paul Hunt in charge of the Human Rights Commission who thinks Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism is okay. That’s the sort of person we’re talking about giving the power to persecute.

The ACT Party says hate speech laws are wrong. A government dependent on ACT will never pass laws that restrict your speech. We will expect National to join with us in repealing any hate speech laws introduced in the dying days of this Government.

Firearm Laws

Free speech allowed ACT to point out that the Government’s firearm laws wouldn’t work, couldn’t work, and haven’t worked. Make no mistake, we are now less safe from gun violence than we were on the 14 March. For three reasons.

One. The buy-back failed. It didn’t just fail to get three quarters of the prohibited firearms; it got the least powerful firearms from the most honest people. Incidentally, they took the money and spent it on more firearms. Firearm retailers just had their best Christmas period since Jesus was a boy.

Two. Good policing relies on trust. The police are the public and the public are the police. Trust in the law and Police is at an all-time low amongst licensed firearm owners because of the rushed legislation. Most people follow laws they disagree with because they trust the process. They believe in parliamentary democracy. It’s difficult to describe how much our Parliament’s rushed gun laws have damaged the dignity of our democracy.

Three. They missed the real problem. How did an Australian weirdo on the wrong side of the Tasman get off a plane and buy an AR-15 with 3,000 rounds of ammo? A single male. Living alone. In another country. Who’d travelled to North Korea and Saudi Arabia. Where were the alarm bells going ding ding ding?

Now you understand why the Government and National rushed through their crazy laws. They’d done nothing about the woeful state of New Zealand’s firearm laws for a generation. They knew the public would soon turn on them if they didn’t act immediately, so they practiced collective punishment for the worst crime in our nation’s history on a group of people who’d done nothing wrong.

This election will decide whether we fix it, or things get worse. The Government can legislate a register before the election but they cannot implement one. ACT in Government would insist on reversing the second tranche of firearm laws, reintroducing the E-category, and getting the woeful Police out of firearm licensing and administration.

That’s the only way to solve the real problems that the Royal Commission will unveil, after the Government’s legislation.

The assault on firearm owners and free speech got attention because they made up the Government’s response to the Christchurch terror attacks.

Zero Carbon Act

The Zero Carbon Bill give more power to Government Ministers than any legislation since Muldoon. What’s worse, it will do nothing about its stated goal of reducing climate emissions. The legislation is so filled with escape hatches that it will never actually reduce emissions. How do I know this? The British have had the same law for over a decade. Their emission reductions per dollar of GDP have been no better than ours.

But it’s given a Minister the undemocratic ability to set plans for whole industries. A Government Minister setting carbon budgets will have the power to effectively decide whether steel, or aluminium is profitable or even if it survives.

ACT put up amendments that would remove those Ministerial Powers, making them come to Parliament before setting any kind of industrial plan. We also put up amendments saying New Zealanders should be able to use foreign carbon credits if they’re cheaper.

The Parliament, including National, voted against our proposed changes, so we didn’t support the bill.

Oil and Gas Exploration

Speech, firearms, and climate change are issues that get attention, but the erosion of freedom has happened in almost every policy area.

New Zealand is already a hostile environment for energy and mineral investment. This is crazy. There are probably more New Zealanders working in Australian mines than New Zealand ones.

The ban on oil and gas exploration is nuts. Announcing that the Government will allow no more exploration permits without Cabinet papers or consultation is a sure way to scare away the investment we need to raise worker productivity and wages.

The Environmental Protection Agency was supposed to make scientifically robust decisions about who could mine. They’ve been disastrous, preventing environmentally sound projects that could bring investment jobs and growth.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

The next Government will have to start taking an objective approach to the benefits of the energy and mineral sectors.

Landlords

Second only to licenced firearm owners, landlords are the most persecuted group under this Government.

The Government is so opposed to anyone who’s worked, saved and invested, that they have actually hurt tenants in their rush to attack landlords.

Landlords perform an incredible service. If you don’t want to save, purchase, do maintenance, pay rates and insurance, and generally be responsible for a property, guess what? Landlords will do it for you. Often they charge rent that doesn’t even cover the mortgage interest rate on the property they’re renting out.

You might think that landlords are the greatest benefactors in our society. As a renter myself I’m thrilled that someone is kind enough to do all the work and take all the risk for me. The weekly fee amounts to barely 2 per cent return on equity but hey, that’s their problem.

Yet, somehow, landlords have become the whipping boys and girls of this Government. Letting fees are banned, tenants are given even more rights to occupy their property against their will, constant regulatory upgrades add to their cost.

The result is predictable enough. If you make it harder to be a landlord, you get fewer landlords. If you raise their costs, they put up rents.

Because the Government doesn’t understand the relationship between landlords and tenants, because they see the world through a hundred-year-old lens of class warfare, they’ve kneecapped the very people they’re trying to help.

Employment Law

Employment is another relationship this Government fundamentally doesn’t understand. You can either take the risk of putting together capital, ideas, and customers for the privilege of giving other people jobs, or you can just work for someone else made enough to do it.

Like landlords, this Government thinks employers are a cash cow, there to be milked for better pay and conditions. That’s why we see the highest minimum wage in the world going up a dollar at a time. That’s why we see the threat of national awards, where wages get negotiated for whole industr