Kia ora koutou katoa, my name is Hayley Horan, I'm the CEO of Business Central, the home of Wellington Chamber of Commerce. Thank you all for joining us today and a huge welcome to the 75 people that are online live streaming into this fabulous session. We're very excited to hear from the Minister shortly, but before we do, it's very important that we touch on our housekeeping.
In the event of a fire, please use the nearest exit and gather either on Lambton Quay or car park entrances on Warring Taylor or Johnson Street. I should know this off by heart by now, but it's important that I read it. If there's an earthquake, stay inside and move away from the windows and there is no fire drill today, so if there are any alarms, it will be real.
Please follow the people in the high-vis. The women's toilets are by the kitchen and the men's are through the lift corridor to the left. It's very exciting today because today is the business, Beehive to Business, where we kick off our election series of events and we are looking to host every leader of every political party in Parliament.
And it's an absolute pleasure to start this series with Leader of the ACT Party, Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour. And before we begin, I would like to also acknowledge the incredible diplomatic corps that we have in Wellington. Yet again, just another, another secret source of ours.
We have Her Excellency Maria Ballin-Bogado. I'm going to have to learn to say that better, I know. Ambassador of the Argentine Republic, His Excellency Lawrence Meredith, Ambassador of the European Union, His Excellency Cristiano Magapinto, Ambassador of Italy and the best dressed person in the house.
And Deputy Head of Mission at the French Embassy, Vincent Gremeret. I'm sure I'm saying that. I will practice my pronunciations.
Can I please also acknowledge Mary Lossie, CEO at Pacific Business Trust for joining us today. Where are you? She's in the house somewhere. Anyway, now I'd like to hand over to Matthew Allen before we head to the Minister, who will be welcoming the Minister.
And where is Matthew? Thank you so much for your sponsorship. We could not do this without you. Thank you.
Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome to Beehive to Business Breakfast. It's wonderful to see such a full crowd. It's probably proof, if ever any was needed, that a cup of coffee and a hot croissant and a cabinet minister is the biggest drawcard in Wellington.
Even in election year, where every politician in the country is suddenly very keen to have breakfast with someone. So these breakfasts exist to build genuine understanding between government and business, and connection matters more, not less, when policy environment is changing at pace. This morning, that feels particularly true.
We're operating in a global environment that is, to put it mildly, very unsettled. The conflict in the Middle East is creating considerable uncertainty around fuel supply chains, and while New Zealand's stocks remain, we're told, reasonably healthy, and the government has advised there's no immediate cause for alarm, the situation is one that businesses, particularly here in Wellington, are watching closely. Rising fuel costs have real consequences for how we operate, how we plan, and how we think about the months ahead.
As Hayley said, we understand Minister Seymour will speak to the government's thinking on where things stand, and how New Zealand's position to respond. That makes this particular breakfast rather more timely than most, and we're very grateful to have him here to speak to it. Of course, there's a broader policy context as well.
The push to reduce unnecessary compliance costs, reform how regulations are made, and ensure government activity actually delivers value, these remain live and important issues for businesses in this room. For Wellington, where the public and private sectors are closely intertwined, the quality of regulation shapes how confidently we invest and plan ahead. So we have, shall we say, a professional interest in getting it right.
To our speaker, Sir David Seymour is the leader of the ACT Party and Deputy Prime Minister, a role he's held since May last year. He's been the Minister of Parliament of Epsom since 2014, winning the seat four times, and has led ACT through a remarkable period of growth for the party. As Minister for Regulation, Associate Minister of Finance, Education, Health and Justice, he has made regulatory reform a genuine legislative priority, most recently with the passage of the Regulatory Standards Act.
It took three attempts and a better part of 20 years to get there. Whether that's conviction or stubbornness probably depends a little bit on your politics, but on persistence at least, there's no debate. Minister Seymour came to Parliament from a background in engineering and philosophy, which turns out to be an ideal preparation for a career spent asking whether the structures we build actually work the way we think they do.
So Minister, thank you for joining us. We look forward to your address, and please join me in welcoming Deputy Prime Minister, Honourable David Seymour. Well, thank you very much, Matthew, for that very eloquent introduction, and thank you, Hayley, and congratulations on the new role.
I should acknowledge the many members of the Diplomatic Corps. I actually thought I'd... Initially, I thought I'd been sort of tricked into attending a UN function. So, bonjour, and bonjour, and hola, and to the Irish guy, hello.
See, I can do multilingual introductions, but I've been asked to speak about the path to the election of the politics and economics of New Zealand, which I could still do, but I thought given the circumstances that are unfolding for a lot of people, there's one issue that matters, and it's fuel generally, and diesel specifically. So I thought I would talk a little bit about that, and in particular, draw on some lessons from COVID. I think one of the things that is driving the response is in the back of our minds the thought that we've been through a national-level disruption, and we've considered the options of government intervention, and we've learnt a few things along the way, and I wanted to drill down into five of those this morning.
I think if you look at the circumstance in general, as far as fuel goes, we are not in bad shape right now, but it will be a game of two halves. You may have seen as of last night, we had 59 days of petrol, 55 days of diesel, and 50 days of jet fuel, in the case of the first two, actually an improvement on the previous update four days early. That shows that things are actually functioning, but I think that people can also see that as the last ships that got out of the Arabian Gulf reach the refineries that are feeding New Zealand, you start to get a glimpse of the true equilibrium with this constrained supply, and we're only beginning to see what that looks like.
Those refineries, of course, are looking for substitutes around the world, but whether they can keep their feedstock and how they behave at keeping their contracts are questions that nobody really knows the answer to. What is our government doing in this circumstance? Well, first of all, we are working hard on the supply side response, and that means having multiple meetings and bilaterals with our counterparts. The Prime Minister has spoken to the leaders of Singapore, and I always have to stop myself from saying North Korea, and Korea in the last week were in constant contact with counterparts across the ditch and further beyond.
This is all in an effort to ensure that supply keeps flowing, and New Zealand, despite being far away, is not forgotten. There's also initiatives around the regulation of fuel. You will have seen some changes there, and we continue to look at the prospect of underwriting imports if people are leery about sending fuel to such a distant place where the market conditions may be different by the time they arrive, perhaps as a government we're prepared to intervene there, as well as boosting the amount of storage, although, of course, boosting storage is only useful to the extent that you have fuel.
I suspect that we may be concerned about the opposite problem. Then, and only then, do you get to the demand-side response, which is where we don't want to go, and the supply-side response is designed to avoid that. That's why we have phases one and two, which are largely about guidance and suggestion and initiatives to make sure we keep supply up and are as careful as you can be, before you get to phases three and four, which are about how do you decide which things are most important for society to keep functioning.
I know there will be people who say, well, hang on a minute, that we want markets and prices to function and operate. Of course we do, and they are, but on the other hand, markets function best when you have many buyers and many sellers. If you find yourself in a place where you don't have many sellers and you do have a government with an obligation to keep certain public goods going, particularly law and order, basic food supplies and so on, then you need to have a plan to manage that in a time of shortage.
We are working day and night talking to people in just about every sector. You can imagine I spoke to someone from a supermarket chain yesterday, and they're talking about, OK, well, if we had constrained supply, what could we do? Who would absolutely need access? Would somebody who stacks shelves be given some sort of dispensation to be able to get to work? But on the other hand, could we perhaps consolidate our shifts so that more of them can carpool? So at that level of detail, we're working through this so that if we do find ourselves shifting from a supply response to a demand response and needing to work through some real restrictions on fuel use, we're going to be doing it in a way that is prepared and doesn't come with unexpected surprises. And that brings me to some of the thinking, at least in my mind, that comes from spending a period of time reliving COVID, which I'm quite certain nobody would like to do.
But that period did have many lessons if we want to learn them. And be mad to ignore a live experiment in policy and politics that we've just had during what is a scary global situation for many. I spent the years of COVID in opposition, but I half joked that I wanted to be the leader of the proposition.
And during that time, we didn't just criticise government, we also put, as was our party's constitutional role, we also put up a series of papers about other options that the government could take. And today, as we face another event that is global, could be scary, and has already invoked a response from government, what a time to dust off some of the reflections that we learnt from that era. And the first one I would say is just avoid the time trap.
The first and most important lesson is not to let the situation warp time. During COVID, the government, I think, did an incredible thing from a physics point of view, they actually slowed time down. The daily press conferences made 24 hours seem like a year.
And the first 24 minutes of each conference seemed like a month as we sort of waited for the preamble before we got the actual figures that everyone had tuned in for. And we forgot in that time trap that New Zealand will be here for a very long time. It will outlive the pandemic as it did.
It will outlive this situation. But any decisions that are made in the time trap cast a long shadow over the country's long term future. In many ways, we are living with that.
The fiscal situation today is the most obvious time warp victim. The figures at that time, the government borrowed a net $100 billion from June 2019 to June 2023. That is a very real problem.
Apart from anything else, it constrains our challenges today. And that, sorry, it constrains our options today. That's why what we've announced to date is targeted at low income households with children.
It's timely. It can be done with existing tax credits rather than creating a new mechanism which can lead to French backpackers, no offence, and in some cases people who are no longer living receiving cost of living payments. Having that mechanism in place is very handy.
It's temporary. So this will end either in a year's time or praise be when petrol falls below $3 for four consecutive weeks, according to MB's reporting. It's also funded.
I think this is the most critical thing of all, that this relief has been done from within the $2.4 billion that was in the budget policy statement in December before any of this kicked off. So we haven't allowed this situation to blow out our fiscals. And if you read the Fitch ratings warning two Saturdays ago, I'm sure you will agree that that is very important.
The time trap lesson, it also puts a stark lens on some of the other proposals being put about. So, for example, I was asked on a radio station that will remain nameless, are you going to follow Australia? I said no. But are you going to follow Australia and actually take fees off public transport or fares off public transport? If you think about it, first of all, it's untargeted.
So everyone from babies to billionaires would benefit from that. But second of all, and most importantly, public transport users are not being affected by fuel costs. In fact, people are moving to public transport to avoid fuel costs.
So in terms of being targeted and timely and funded and temporary, it doesn't tick many of the boxes that you would want expenditure to tick. The other lesson, other than avoiding the time trap, is also balancing human needs. So education, I happen to be responsible for government policy on school attendance.
We need to keep all of New Zealanders goals in perspective. And I'm astonished today at how easily in those COVID times we relegated education down the totem pole of our society's priorities. In many ways, education is actually the only investment that matters, because thoughtful people can solve any problem.
But unthinking people can cause a lot of problems. Some would argue that's why we're here. And how educated the population is will trump any other variable across a generation.
But in COVID times, we abandoned that. Last week, I was asked countless times whether I thought students should be learning from home because of the fuel crisis. I said, of course not, because we can't afford to put education back down that totem pole of priorities again.
And I wondered, as I was being asked this question, you know, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe attendance is falling. But putting aside a couple of days at the end of last week where the weather up north was terrible, and that always has an effect, this month we've had quite a number of days where we've reached 91% of all students being at school.
And those are good figures compared to any time in the last four years. So clearly, despite petrol being well over $3 for a couple of weeks now, people haven't reacted in terms of school attendance. The society is still prioritising it, and so will we.
The third thing, and I suspect that this will resonate with a lot of people in business, is that a response should be done with rather than to people. You know, the COVID response, over time, it took on its own momentum. And there are people who say, look, the start was good, then it kind of lost its way.
And I think that's a fair assessment. By the end of 2021, though, after 18 months of a stage of crisis management, the then Prime Minister had this refrain that was near belligerent. She said, if you want to do X, Y, or Z, go to a concert or whatever, then get vaccinated.
And I thought the belligerent tone in that refrain was, for me, the point where I thought this has gone far too far. But of course, vaccination, that was just a flashpoint. Many others felt the response was being done to rather than with them.
There was a school that had its Australian approved rapid antigen tests confiscated. Now, how dare they take initiative? There was the Auckland restaurants who were told excitedly one morning that they could open because the America's Cup would be on that day. And they had to explain that while they were very grateful for the thought, most restaurants, in order to open, actually have to order the food in the night before.
Now, if you do it with, you would know that. If you do it to, you might not. And you end up with an enormous amount of frustration.
There were hairdressers and event promoters who showed they could operate just as effectively and safely as a shopping mall that was allowed to be open. And yet, their frustration fell on deaf ears. And that's why, as I say, our government has been working double time to actually talk to people in business about the very many practicalities that people face from running a hairdressing salon to hopefully won't be too dependent on diesel.
Although we are, we have just legalised alcohol in hairdressers to actually getting a restaurant done. There are extensive discussions about what steps would be taken. And it's far better to have a, because it's far better to have a plan that you never use than jump to the podium with no plan at all.
We've all seen how that can end. And I mentioned in that spirit, the red tape tip line. We're not only working with business to work through problems that we may have, but we're asking for suggestions about solutions that we may not have thought of that there was even a problem.
So, in the last sort of 48 hours since the red tape tip line opened on Sunday morning, we've had dozens of quite substantial suggestions. For example, we've heard that there are trucks that deliver petrol that have to confirm their delivery route every two weeks, and nobody knows why, including us. So, hopefully, that's something we'll say, look, if we can reduce the cost for you right there, why wouldn't we do it? We've had people point out that ethanol is allowed to be up to 15% of petrol in the US, but only 10% here.
There may be reasons. There may be things that the Americans don't know that we do. It may be that engines are different.
It may be that we just don't have the supply of ethanol to make this a binding constraint. All those things are possible. On the other hand, if it was possible to get another 5% out of your petrol supply, well, in these circumstances, 5% is quite a lot.
So, why wouldn't we do it? And no doubt, there'll be many more initiatives coming through the red tape tip line that will allow us to do that. I think the fourth lesson, other than avoiding the time trap and looking at all human needs and doing with rather than to, is just to remember that we're all human and we're all New Zealanders. And we're lucky in this country to have democracy and due process, because those things give each person the dignity of being seen and being heard.
And the COVID response over time became a lesson in what not to do. The closure of Parliament, of course, can be debated. Other countries closed their Parliaments for longer.
And ours still functioned online at times. But there was something else that I think we should all worry about. And that was the way that people accepted the suspension of democracy and the rule of law so easily as soon as they panicked.
When the police commissioner got up and said that the police would follow people around and perhaps, quote, take them to our place, there wasn't actually a law that he was enforcing. And when you have the most senior police officer in the country get up and say that they're going to go and harass citizens, not in pursuit of upholding the law, but just because they think it's the fashionable thing to do, that's actually quite scary. When I think about the way that people were prepared to snitch on each other, I'll never forget an elderly couple who'd been out to sit on the grass in St Heliers.
But being older, their knees weren't so good. And so they'd taken some deck chairs. And they had other members of the public and police saying, you're not allowed a deck chair on the grass.
These are old people with weak knees. Give us a break. But we so very quickly abandoned that basic decency, despite being asked to be kind.
The other thing that really stood out at that time, I recall Judith Collins attempting to get to Wellington as the official leader of the opposition, trying to ask questions in the House and hold the government to account, a fundamental part of our way of life and our democracy. And people saying, look, it's not important for you to travel from Auckland to Wellington. I, of course, as soon as I heard there was a case, I got on the first plane and was camped out in Wellington already.
That's how she's the official leader of the opposition. But nonetheless, it should really bother people that, you know, there wasn't a strong sense in our community that actually having that person there is just as essential as the many plane loads of public servants who were going up and down between Auckland and Wellington every day. I thought that was really worrying.
And I think it's essential that any possible restrictions on normal life are done clearly and transparently, without shortcuts on democracy or due process. It matters in a fuel shortage as much as it did in COVID, because any move to ration, demand or limit normal activity will touch millions of ordinary New Zealanders. And if people are being asked to change how they live, they're entitled to know the rules, the reasons and the legal basis for them.
Otherwise, you risk ignoring that fourth lesson about treating people as we are all New Zealanders and all human. And finally, another lesson that came out was learn from the world and don't try to reinvent every wheel. I think sometimes in New Zealand, we have a bit of a habit of thinking that we are the world and they're all just waiting to follow us.
For example, there was that time when we banned nuclear weapons and everyone else got rid of theirs immediately. We occasionally overestimate. I see the diplomats are laughing.
I think there's a tendency to think that we are really special and different. And I'm very proud to be a New Zealander. I think ultimately, we are the most successful society that's ever existed.
We're pioneering. We are kind, thoughtful, innovative people who have built this wonderful place. But that doesn't mean that we can't learn anything.
I mentioned those thermometers that had been approved in Australia being confiscated from a school in Auckland. That was just nuts. In stark contrast to that approach, we've actually harmonized our fuel standards with Australia.
So if it can go in a tank over there, I think it'll probably be OK over here. I've been to Australia. I've seen their cars.
They're not that different. It's just the drivers. And then you look at COVID.
Our isolation was a big factor then. And it was kind of helpful that we had several weeks notice as each variant of COVID crawled slowly across the globe. Today, we're tracing back ships coming to Marsden Point from Korean and Singaporean refineries.
And then we're tracing the ships that are going to provide feedstock to those refineries. If we can see what's coming, we can take time to prepare. We can watch what others are doing.
And we can plan our own response. We should never be too proud to learn from others. We're pretty good.
But we don't have a monopoly on wisdom. We can't let today's crisis erode our country's future. The latest Treasury figures put net core crown debt at $191.4 billion.
That alone is reason to treat every new commitment seriously. Every dollar we borrow today is a dollar that we are borrowing, frankly, from our children. Fiscal discipline is what stops the first shock being followed by a second one.
It's what helps contain inflationary pressure. It protects interest rates from staying higher for longer. And it is what means that if genuine hardship support becomes necessary, government can provide it without making everything else worse.
So when we say, don't take your eye off the fiscals, we're not changing the subject. You can already hear the other instinct from the opposition. More spending, more intervention, more relief that will be borrowed.
More politics built around the appearance of action. And that's what would be happening if we did not have a government that has learned the lessons of COVID. But with cool heads, we can respond to fuel shortages from the Iran without committing to the knee-jerk mistakes of COVID.
That means understanding that our long-term future must not be eroded by short-term theatrics. That is the approach that we must bring to this response. We can't prevent every external shock, but we can make sure that New Zealand responds with discipline and common sense.
And that's the evidence base that we take into this. I think COVID, for all its faults, is a valuable repository of lessons that we intend to take into any response to this situation. And those are just five of them, distilled for your listening pleasure.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much, it was incredible, a lot of insight and lessons but now it's time for the questions. So we have time for about two or three questions, we have 70 plus people online and anyone in the room if you'd like to hands up, oh I'm very loud, and ask a question that'd be great. Yes Lance.
Given we're talking about fuel, I'm just wondering if there's any possibility of looking at re-opening Marston Point again? Yeah, I mean this comes up a lot and you're going to be sorry you asked this, it's my special subject. My grandad helped build it in 62 and expand it in 85, basically every member of my family including me have worked at least one summer in the sandpit, so we know a little bit about it. The simple facts are that if you look around the world over the last decade, across the States and across Australia, smaller, older, less efficient refineries have closed down and there are some people who say well I don't like that perhaps but then the question is why? If it's about efficiency and affordability then you wouldn't want to re-open it, I mean the reason that the shareholders, not the government I might add, chose to close it was because it was not viable, they just couldn't refine and produce for the price that others were.
Then you say okay, well perhaps it would be useful from a resilience position to have quote unquote our own and I can understand that. We're at a time in history where it feels like there's a whole lot of stuff going on in the world and big forces are doing stuff to us and we just want to hold on and resist it. I completely understand that instinct but as it happens, as mentioned, I'm an electrical engineer so we don't do fields, we do numbers and reels.
The simple fact is that all of it is coming off a boat and all of it is liquid. The actual location of the refining, whether that's within New Zealand's border or outside New Zealand's border, doesn't make much impact on the final result. If you look at the situation today in Korea, they are looking and beating the bushes for exactly the same feedstock, that heavy sour crude that Marston Point ran on and if it was open today, we would just be having a near identical conversation about getting feedstock rather than refined product.
Look, I'm a free market pro-business guy, if someone thinks that they can make a refinery work, I'll be the first to be there saying, how can we remove regulatory barriers to you doing that? But I just suspect if you look at the trend around the world, that the business case won't stack up and then you come to the public policy case in terms of resilience and that doesn't stack up either. And the other issue is people say, well what about drill our own? Well, that would be great but there's a couple of issues there. One is that some people banned looking for it which has set us back a decade.
Interestingly, the same people who are now complaining about the refinery being shut. And second of all, the oil that was being drilled in New Zealand and still is being to some extent, is the kind of light sweet crude which is good for making the sorts of things that go in jets and cars, less good for things like bitumen and diesel. That's why we're importing the sour heavy from the Middle East.
So it's a good story but unfortunately you've messed with the wrong nerd. Who else would like to mess with the wrong nerd? I don't have that many special subjects so you're probably safe. Any other questions? Yes sir.
Minister, you've talked about the lessons from COVID. What lessons have you learned from being in a coalition government and what would you do differently if you find yourself in a few months' time? Other than get more votes. Look, I think what you've seen is actually a government that has worked together extremely well, especially compared with the hopes and prognostications of our opponents.
In fact, we've been devastatingly effective from their point of view. I think they thought it would all last five seconds. And why is that? I think the conventions of government are quite good.
So the way that we've kept collective responsibility and cabinet confidentiality, those things have been really useful. I think also the fact that there's been quite a lot of give and take has been really useful. So we have managed the coalition, I think, very well.
I think some people might ask the question, for all that management, has that management detracted from the kinds of reforms that are going to take on our big problems as a country? And the big problems for me are, first of all, productivity. How do we pay our way? How do we maintain the first world status that we all feel we were born into? A corollary of that is, how do we balance the budget and actually manage to have kinder words from the fitchers of the world, but also be able to absorb shocks? If you look at what folks out of the Treasury have been saying, basically we're running a 2% structural deficit, so call that $9 billion. We need to save about 1% a year to allow for shocks that seem to come along more than every decade, but a 10% shock every decade, that's another percent.
Call that $4 billion. So that's about a $13 billion structural deficit that needs to be dealt with regardless of the cycles. And really, the question is, do you do it sooner or later? If you do it sooner, people will complain, no doubt.
But if you do it later, they're going to complain for longer because it will be our children who are dealing with the accumulated debt. I think that's one challenge. And I think there's another sense of who we are as a country.
We've been through several phases of this. We're clearly not British. We're not American.
We've had this kind of bicultural lens that some people like, a lot of other people recoil at, and it doesn't seem to accurately reflect the many different places, the many different waves of settlement that make up modern New Zealand. And so I think the challenge for the future is how do you deal with those three big questions? And I think we've made very good progress, but there's no question that it's challenging the more moving parts you have in a coalition to take that sort of decisive action. Thank you.
Christine, what have we got online? I've got a couple of questions online, but maybe following on from that one, what does the ACT work priorities look like for this election year? I just want to acknowledge all the people online. I think in a way that those three things are it. Each of them you can spin out into quite a lot of sort of sub-priorities.
But if you take just productivity, because that drives just about everything else, there is clearly a big problem in our society, which I think has been encapsulated brilliantly by the way by Natasha Hamilton-Hart in her book Stupid Rules. And the problem is simply that we have encapsulated ourselves in wimps of rules, but we've taken away the authority for people to act. Local government's a perfect example of that.
Here in Wellington, the elected people have so little authority, they're run by the public service who have the ability to interpret all the rules because they have greater resource. It got so absurd that when the elected mayor of the capital city of New Zealand was told you have to have an office on the ground floor for safety reasons, she said, OK. I find that it's one of the most amusing but also telling events where somebody finds themselves so used to following this web of rules.
And when things go wrong, we don't say, well, who had authority? Who's accountable for that? We say, oh, we'll go back to the rules committee and make more rules. So this challenge around regulation, the purpose of the regulatory standards bill, putting some discipline on rulemaking so that we can get back to people having authority and being a bit empowered, the way that we like to think of ourselves as the people of the number eight wire, rather than sort of cowering at the prospect of a WorkSafe visit, that's got to be front of mind for unleashing productivity. We can point to things like resource management reform, health and safety reform, the Ministry of Regulations work, all of which I think are taking us in the right direction.
But if we want to have technology absorption, leading edge industries and real pressure to raise wages by raising productivity, then we need to take on that regulatory piece in an even bigger way than we have already. Thanks. Thank you.
Top one there. Hi, Minister. Thinking about the previous election and you had a number of priorities around health, I'm just wondering, with the link to productivity and in the view of getting New Zealand back on track and doing the things that we do well and not forgetting about education and health and all the things in a crisis, how much is health going to feature in your kind of election and priorities? I think health is absolutely critical.
If you go back to that goal of, you know, I said it's about paying our way, balancing the books and knowing who we are, you know, health is just absorbing so much cash. And it's really come to light because, as you'll know, and, you know, Liz is from a pharmaceutical company, I've been trying and may yet succeed to make the case for Pharmac to have a bigger budget on the basis that we are going to save money elsewhere. So, if you fund Trikafta, you don't have to do lung transplants for people with CF.
I mean, obviously great for those people but also great for taxpayers because I don't know how much a lung transplant costs but I'm guessing a lot. But here's the thing. Nobody knows how much a lung transplant costs because we don't do price and volume funding in health.
We basically say, here's the money, go and do good things. And if you meet these government targets for vaccination and being seen within 24 hours, all the better. Sorry, six hours was the target.
Until we have a better sense of what we're spending and what we're getting in healthcare, it's very difficult to make these trade-offs between technology, productivity enhancing technology, such as new medicines or new devices, on the one hand, and just putting another billion or two every year into keeping the whole thing, holding the whole thing together without being clear on productivity growth or results. So, it's crucial. We'll have a lot more to say about it but we cannot continue saying productivity is flat so if you want more stuff, put in more money.
That's not sustainable. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking the leader of the Act Party. Thank you so much, folks.
Appreciate it. Now, we are coming to a close but I would be remiss if I wasn't to ask, if you are not a member of the wonderful Wellington Chamber of Commerce or Business Central, please stay behind, have a cup of coffee and one of us will come and speak with you. But thank you so much to Allen + Clarke for supporting this incredible Beehive to Business event.
Thank you to our members, thank you to everybody online. I hope you have a wonderful Wellington day. Go and enjoy all the fabulous things we have to offer.
Thank you so much.
