Growth policies needed —Peters

Press, 27 July 1989, Page 6

Growth policies needed —Peters

By

OLIVER RIDDELL

In Wellington A Budget tonight that does not institute policies aimed at economic growth will be a mad Budget, according to the Opposition’s Mr Winston Peters. Mr Peters, National’s employment and Maori affairs spokesman, gave a speech in Wellington last evening on what should be in the Budget “It comes at a time when the country is punch-drunk with restructuring,” he said. "The last lot to restructure an economy like this Government were the Vandals when they sacked Rome.” The Minister of Finance, Mr Caygill, had to institute policies aimed at economic growth and "get rid of this mad monetarist obsession with reducing inflation, whatever the consequences.” It was appalling, Mr Peters said, that the new Reserve Bank Bill gave the Governor of the Reserve Bank only one economic priority — to reduce inflation to between zero and 2 per cent. "Too bad if that means 200,000 end up unemployed,” he said, “as long as the Reserve Bank blunders on in its Quixotic way.” Mr Peters said there had been much talk recently about splits in the Opposition over economic policy, but, he said, National’s alm was united — balanced policies that targeted economic growth. “That means intervention in the economy,” Mr Peters said. “But it is not intervention that is at issue ... it is the quality of that intervention that matters.” The 66,000 long-term unemployed were at critical risk. Yet the Government could think of nothing better for them than to pay them the dole. Any nation that could only pay conscience money to its unemployed, and reduce them to a subsistence welfare lifestyle, had failed. New Zealand could and had to do better. No matter how much economic growth there was in the future, the critical need was to get jobs now for the long-term unemployed.