Spoken English
Quotes from the first two televised debates with Jacinda Ardern.
The median wage in New Zealand in the last 12 months went up 3.6%, well ahead of inflation.
Women’s pay went up quite a bit further than men’s and the gender gap dropped from 12% to 9% and we now have the fifth-lowest gender pay gap in the world.
People can’t go shopping with your values. They need to know what impact removing their tax reductions is going to have. On the average wage, they’ll be $1000 a year worse off. Every person who does not have children will be worse off.
Wages have been rising at about twice the rate of inflation. You know how we know that? Because that’s how our national super is calculated. The average national wage has gone up $13,000 in the last eight years. Transparency would require the Labour Party to say what the capital gains tax is, the water tax, the petrol tax, the wealth tax.
On the first of April next year, because of the package we put in place in the Budget, child poverty in New Zealand … will drop by 30% – 50,000 fewer kids in poverty. I’m proud of that … if we can get [re-] elected, within two or three years, we can have a crack at the next 50,000 children getting them out of poverty … I am committing to that.
We want everyone to be able to have a home and the best news for them is there’s 200,000 houses going to be built in New Zealand over the next six years.
What’s driving migration is the strength of the economy. Someone has to pick the kiwifruit. Someone has to milk the cows. Someone has to drive the trucks. I’ll tell you the bit where, I agree, we didn’t plan. Five years ago, 40,000 Kiwis a year were leaving for Australia. I admit we did not plan that the number now would be zero.
Labour’s plan is higher taxes, bigger government spending, more rules and regulations that will stall the economy.
About five years ago, about half of Maori kids were getting to NCEA level two. Today three-quarters of them [are], and were going to push that up over 80%. That is thousands more getting to the start line for further training and a decent job.
There will be a capital gains tax and it’ll include the teacher and the policeman who’ve got married and bought a second house for their savings. It’ll include the person who has started up a new business, and as the value of that new business grows and they sell it, they’ll have to pay capital gains tax.
We’ve spent four or five years changing everything, for the way the Reserve Bank works to a new Auckland Unitary Plan and special housing areas, so we can get the house built and we can now get the 60,000 first-home buyers into them. I do support the [abortion] law as it stands.
If countries like Portugal, or Colorado in the US, can show that a more liberal [cannabis] regime would mean less harm, then I’d look at it.
A strong economy makes it easier to have high environmental standards. Sixty thousand fewer kids wake up tomorrow morning in a benefitdependent household.
We’re in the biggest construction boom New Zealand has ever seen. For 18-year-olds leaving school, this is the best opportunity in a generation. The National Party is much better equipped to deal with our most dysfunctional families, intergenerational welfare, that’s the policy every party should take on.
I got up and saw this country, built from the bottom of a recession to one of the best-performing economies in the developed world.