Alliance 1996 (20.08). Bold is text. Pam Corkery: “The most-wealthy have had their taxes halved. The most vulnerable have had had the greatest burden.” Sandra Lee: “I think that this election is probably one of the most important in this country’s history. We have to face the fact, whether we like it or not, that we are at a cross roads.” Jim Anderton: “You shouldn’t have to fear that if you can’t pay for it you don’t get the care you need.” Jeanette Fitzsimons: “A large proportion of New Zealanders are being told by recent governments that they are not wanted, they’re not valued, there is no place for them in this society. And the Alliance is saying yes there is. An important message from the Alliance Jim Anderton: “We have inequality in this country, and we have a lack of trust, and those are the two issues which the New Zealand population will be looking at, at this election. The government of New Zealand, the National government says, there is not enough money for free health or education. The National government is giving away 1030 million dollars. You could have an entirely free health system for less than that. We can afford free health “Free to go to the doctor, the prescription charges free, no out patient charges at hospitals. A massive investment in mental health. No waiting lists in hospitals. You could fix all of that for less than the government is giving away in taxes this year. And most of those taxes, that are being cut, are given to the most affluent people in the community. Sixty percent of all tax cuts are going to twenty percent of the top income earners in New Zealand. And worse still they say, if we vote for them on October the 12th, they’ve going to give us more next year; we’ve going to get another $1300 million between us. You could have a free education system for that. You could abolish the surcharge. You could have income related rents, instead of market rentals. You can do enormous numbers of things just within the two years the government is going to give away nearly $2600 million dollars in tax cuts to the richest people in the country. It is not that we haven’t got the money, it is a question of who the government is giving it to. They prefer tax cuts for the rich to giving decent health, education and housing services to everyone else in the community.” How can we fix health? Anderton: “We cancel the tax cuts for the rich and we’d make the health system of New Zealand free to those who need health care. They’ll get it because they need it, not because they can pay for it.” “Political promises, you are hearing them today. I remember one, Labour 1984, Labour if elected will not introduce prescription charges. Two years later they introduced them. I asked David Caygill, a lawyer, Minister of the Crown, how could the Labour government introduce something it said it would not do. He said, “Well Jim, there are a lot of different definitions to the word not”. Labour introduced prescription charges and 27 public hospitals were closed. “The disastrous situation is this, the older you are and the more likely you are to get sick, the more the premiums for private health insurance. The private health insurance companies price older people out of the market. If your kid is born with a hole in your heart you can forget about getting an insurance policy; they don’t want to know you if you are likely to be sick, or if you’ve got an illness that they can define now, and even the government starts doing that. They say, oh well, Alzheimers disease isn’t a disease really: it is an age-related disability. So poor old Harry up in Whangarei has to take out his $90,000 and start paying for his wife. Or if you are an individual living in your home, you’ve saved up your money for it, and you have to go in seriously ill to a hospital; you’ll be asked to get rid of your home and pay for your hospital care. We don’t do that yet to small children, say with leukemia, who have got just as much an age-related disability, really as an Alzheimers disease patient, but I bet you it won’t be long before we do. What we are saying is you shouldn’t have to rely on getting into hospital, getting decent healthcare, education and housing opportunities just because you can pay for it. Because, if you do, then the kind of benefits that we see health and education offering to the whole community are only for those who can pay. So, user pays simply means if you can pay you can use. And if you can’t pay you can’t use it. So, then we differentiate the health care of a poor person isn’t going to be dealt with unless that person can pay. They’ll wait for four or five years on a hospital waiting list. A rich person can buy your way into hospital any time you like. (4.28) Free health: The Alliance is the only party that guarantees that every New Zealander has free access to quality healthcare when they need it. Anderton: “I had one of my constituents had a heart attack, a bad one. Put on a waiting list in Canterbury for two years. Wasn’t prepared at 43 years of age to do that, decided to buy his operation in a private hospital. So he did, it cost him $20,000. You know the private hospital he bought it into, the Dunedin public hospital that is where he got his operation. Under National almost 100,000 on hospital waiting lists. Anderton: “The Alliance is the only party that is taking this head on. NZF is saying you can go to the doctor free if you are under 12; what about 13, 14 or 65, 67. Why under twelves? Labour has got an under five or whatever, they all play around but basically what we need is a free healthcare system for all New Zealanders, rich or poor. You pay for it over your life time through the tax system but when you really need healthcare you get it, not because you can afford to pay for it, but because you need the healthcare, that is the sort of system we need. “The regional health authorities are the most useless piece of bureaucracy ever to be put between patients and doctors and nurses that I’ve ever seen. It costs $65 million per year to run RHAs and as far as I can see all they do is produce paper. They don’t produce answers or solutions, or treatments for people. Lets take the $65 million that is paid to these bureaucrats, these policy analysts, and writers of reports and studies and pay them to the hospitals where nurses and doctors treat real people with real illnesses and get them cured or recovered and back into the community and into their homes. That is where the money should be spent. Not on RHA bureaucrats, they are the people who are earning huge sums of money while patients wait longer and longer to get into hospitals. It must be galling to many people, who are waiting for years to get into the Auckland hospital to find out that people not only get paid high salaries, but they get bonuses the longer the waiting lists get. That has got to end. You are going to have elected councils where people have the right to have a say in their own health policy and we are going to get rid of the bureaucrats who stand between doctors and nurses and the patients who need them. We can afford free education by the year 2001 students will owe the government $4.6 billion. Thirty-five thousand six hundred and eighty-four students have taken out student loans this year and more than 18,292 will not repay their student debt until they are at least 40 years old. And some of you, about nearly 4,000 won’t repay them until you retire, and some of you won’t repay them until you die, but the good news is that the government says if you die they’ll waive the loan. So there is always an alternative you see. They are all heart these people. The student body at Otago university in just four years had racked up a debt to the government of $159 million. That $159 million by many of them will never be paid back in their lifetime. The students owe the government $1600 at the moment. Last year they paid back $60 million and it cost the government $94 million to get it. You see the downstream social repercussions of this have never been thought through. If you want to set up in practice in anything, even if you are a technician and you want to set up as a tradesperson, then you are owing forty or fifty thousand dollars at least, how on earth are you going to get money from the bank to set up your capital equipment and all the rest of it because you owe just too much. And you are going to be paying ten cents in the dollar extra, over and above the top rate of tax you are paying, so half of your income in tax until you are what 30, 35 or whatever. And then if you are a woman and you go out of the workforce to look after the kids or if you are a man and do the same, and are a caregiver and you are out for 10 years, as soon as you step back in your marginal tax rate is woof, and you’ll actually have a disincentive to go back in the workforce. Under National, student fees rose 263%. Anderton: “So the advantage or disadvantage in New Zealand will then be whether you are rich or poor, or whether your family is rich or poor. So the kids are going to be penalised as to which family they were born into. The principle issues are that we should have free education from kindergarten to tertiary level because education is the most important community good you can have for the future of any nation. If we don’t have well educated nurses and doctors, if we don’t have decent lawyers, accountants and teachers we won’t have a civilised community. If you’d like to help the Alliance phone 0800 10 10 96. “If we don’t have well educated parents, we won’t have the kids of New Zealand knowing a bit about their own history and where they’ve come from, and where the future lies, and some of the mistakes that have been made in the past, learning from by the whole community. Now this means that from kindergarten to primary school to secondary school, right through to Polytechnic and university, you don’t get access to education because you have the money to pay, you get access because you need to access education at a very vulnerable time in your life. Every single New Zealander should have an equal chance at education. We are wasting the skills and talents of a lot of young people by not developing them or not giving the change to develop them to the absolute limit of their ability. And worst still we are actually creating underclasses of people who come out of school without being able to read or write, where do you think they end up? They end up in prison. And eighty percent of people in prison can’t read or write properly. And then we say leave prison and get a job. Get a job where, when you can’t read and write. We have too many failures coming through the education system, not because of the fault of the teachers but because we have overcrowded classrooms, because we do not have enough specialists to deal with the problems you can identify early on in a school year with children, but if you don’t have the resources to deal with them those kids slip through the cracks and they end up on the street and ultimately they end up in prison. If we want to something about crime, we’ve got to do something about the causes of crime. And an effective education is one of the best antidotes to crime that I know of. Free education: The Alliance is the only party that guarantees all New Zealanders free access to all levels of education: early childcare, primary, secondary and tertiary. A word in your ear about money. Most people are earning below the average wage and under the Alliance tax policy they’ll pay less tax because we don’t believe they have enough money to live on now. Those on above average wages, those on about the average wage are not earning a lot of money, ranges from six to seven hundred dollars a week, and those people will start to pay a little more tax, a few dollars at first, but if you look at what our package says for them, free healthcare. A family on $35,000 per year, which is $700 per week, would have to pay about $700 for private health insurance. That is $14 to $16 a week. Now we are saying you pay $6 or $7 more in tax, but you get a free health system. In education, if you’ve got kids going to kindergarten you are asked to pay fifty cents a day. If you have two kids going to kindergarten that is $5 a week. And it is called a voluntary levy, but kindergartens can’t exist now without the parents paying levies. And you go onto primary and secondary school, you get school levies there. And if you want your kids to go to university or polytech and you don’t want them to end up owing the government $30,000 or $40,000 you are going to have to start saving $65 per week for about 10 years to let your kids have a free education at university level. If you take all this money out of a household budget, in what they call user charges, it amounts to enormous amounts of tax each year. So if those people are paying a few more dollars a week in tax, but they are getting free healthcare, free education, if they’re in a state rental they’re paying income related rents not market rents, that alone will make them $40 to $50 a week better off as a family. And then of course you’ve got the removal of GST. GST is a huge imposition on low to middle income earners because they have to pay $12.50 in every $100 for their need to buy food or clothing, or go to the doctor, or even, for goodness sake, on their rates. They own a house they have to pay rates, they have to pay $12.50 in every $100 rates to the government and that is a tax on a tax. And we would replace GST with a financial transactions tax, which makes all of the financial community that gets exempted from paying GST share in the tax system. And that is much fairer system than we’ve got now. Fairer taxes: The Alliance will lower taxes for New Zealanders with incomes of $28, 500 p.a. and less. “Every New Zealander who gets a power bill knows that those power bills are based on fixed line charges where you pay for electricity even if you don’t use it. People are up in arms about the way in which power is charged for in this country. We will abolish fixed lined charges. Image: We won’t sell out. And while we’re at it we’ll force Telecom to reduce their line charges too because they are ripping off the whole community. They could give every single new Zealander a free phone and still make more money than Brierley Investments and Fletcher Challenge put together. What about the surplus? Anderton: “The surplus we talk about isn’t the sort of surplus that you have lots of money stacked away. Part of the student loan debt is part of the surplus. It is the kind of surplus you have when you are not having one. The capital investment the government makes in its plant and equipment, that’s all called part of the operational surplus. But it can’t be spent on health, it is already been spent. And some of these parties that are claiming that the surplus is going to bail them out either are stupid because they don’t understand, or they’re not telling the truth. It is only the Alliance that is saying where the real money is. It is stacked up in the top 10 to 15% of income earners in New Zealand. Those are the people who have accumulated enormous wealth in the last 20 years in this country. They are the people who have to pay their fair share. If we get a fairer share of taxes paid by those people then we can have fair opportunities for all New Zealanders. And that is what the Alliance is saying. And I think in their heart of hearts most New Zealanders, including the rich, know that is true. Because they say in survey after survey oh I would prefer to pay a bit more tax, or I would prefer not to get a tax cut in order to have health and education improved. Well we are challenging them to put their money where their mouth is this election because that is what the Alliance policy is about. Coalition possibilities The reason why we are not prepared to go into a coalition after the election that hasn’t been declared beforehand, and even more importantly the policy basis for which has not been declared beforehand, is the reason we have MMP in the first place is because of the betrayal of Labour and National under first past the post. They promised things in manifestos which they not only did not deliver on, they did the opposite of what they promised. They said they wouldn’t increase tertiary fees. Labour, they increased them by 1100%. National said they would abolish it and Lockwood Smith would resign if they didn’t. They increased it by three, four of five hundred percent. Now over and over again, we’ve been told one thing when another has been done. Labour said they wouldn’t sell the state assets of New Zealand. Richard Prebble sold everything that wasn’t screwed down, and he is up there trying to have a second go. I don’t think New Zealanders want to go through that again. What they want is political parties and politicians to tell them the truth. Leadership you can Trust: the Alliance is the only party that will not sell out its manifesto promises after the election for cabinet posts. The more votes you give us, the stronger the Alliance negotiating position will be after election day. What they say before the election should be what they do afterwards. And that is why the Alliance is not going to sell out. Not to get into government. We won’t sell out. Alliance. What we’ll do after the election is honour our promises. If we can’t get coalition partners that won’t govern on the policies we’ve promised to the people, we’ll use our position in Parliament to keep them honest. Firstly we produced an alternative budget with all our costings so people know who is going to pay the money, where it is coming from, and where it is going to be spent. (Image of Alliance manifesto). You couldn’t put a NZF budget together because you wouldn’t know what the policies were. Labour can’t put an alternative budget together because the figures don’t add up. And if they’ve tried to everyone would know. The Alliance is the only party that has got the honesty to say here is where the money is coming from, some of you will pay more tax so that most of New Zealand, including our young people (sign: Workers have rights too!) can have some hope for the future. Can have a decent job, can be trained and skilled, and educated so New Zealand as a whole has a better future. Health and education and decent housing are not just individual benefits which you purchase for yourself and then use for your own benefit throughout the whole of your life, these are community benefits. We all benefit from good educational opportunities, we all benefit from decent healthcare. Why have we got diseases of poverty in New Zealand now; whooping cough, rickets, scurvy, rheumatic fever, tuberculosis, meningitis. These are all diseases of poverty. If you’d like to help the Alliance phone 0899 10 10 96. These diseases affect the lives of young New Zealanders. Some of them never live to old age because of these diseases. We never had these diseases 30, 40, 50 years ago; we got rid of them when we got rid of poverty. And because we’re getting poverty back now we are getting these diseases. This doesn’t give New Zealanders a fair chance. And it isn’t the kind of civilized community that would put up with it. It isn’t envy of the rich. It is tragedy for hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders who are asked to live below the poverty line. Thirty percent of all children in New Zealand homes live below the poverty line now. How can the rest of New Zealand feel sanguine about that? A lot of our young New Zealanders don’t have any hope for the future. They get depressed at an earlier and earlier age. Why is it now in New Zealand we have the highest youth suicide rate in the western world? We have to start asking some very serious questions about what our society is doing to young people. Why it doesn’t care about young people. We talked about the health system. The mental health system is a disgrace in this country. We all know we have a high youth suicide rate. And yet we have not one single adolescent unit that specialises in the psychiatric care of young people in the whole country, not one. And yet we know we have a vulnerable at risk population of young people and we do nothing to actually see they are looked after. And I think that everyone in New Zealand should have a chance to become rich. But you don’t become rich very often if you don’t have a decent education. You don’t become rich if you don’t have a decent job. You don’t live long enough to become rich unless you’ve got some decent health care. Remember it’s all about trust. Pam Corkery: “So what we are saying is not that magical, it is not that mystical. We just want to make those who are stronger and more able to bare the burden, the better off, are asking them to do it, the top thirty percent under an Alliance government will pay a bit more. The bottom seventy percent, who have unfairly borne this burden, will get relief from us. Sandra Lee: “We’ve got to include all our people. That is no use having what looks like a good economy if it leaves a large number of the people behind. And it is about sharing, it is about community. I think that is the central message, and from there you can go into the social services that the Alliance thinks should be provided by government, rather than out of people’s individual pockets. And the environmental restoration that is necessary for a sustainable economy. Because future generations are part of that community too.” Anderton: “Every child will have a fair chance if everyone pays their fair share. It is our heritage as a nation. Let’s claim it back. Alliance: Leadership you can trust. Announcer: “Vote Alliance. Leadership you can trust.”