Jones Shane: General Debate 
Jones Shane: General Debate 
[Volume:647;Page:15943] 
Hon SHANE JONES (Minister for Building and Construction) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Tena tatou katoa. For an awful moment there I feared that our House and the television cameras might capture Dr Lockwood Smith performing something of a wiggle or a wriggle. He went on to refer to the weasel and of course we feared he might strike that pose which is more suited to his leader—that of the weasel. 
Over the last several months the country has witnessed National members frothing up and down the country and their leader and the front bench foaming about the fact that they have already won the benches of Treasury. They are acting like the proverbial magpie waiting until a silver trinket or a golden gleam flows from the policies and the ideas that our party has laid before the country. They wait and they test whether there is a constituency for those ideas and they eagerly gobble them up fly away and regurgitate them as their own ideas thinking that that is the recipe to win the next election. 
What sorts of ideas have National members tried this form of alchemy on? At every opportunity we see Mr John Key endeavouring to cuddle up to my whanaunga from the Maori Party. Of course they are too drowsy to realise that the man’s real agenda and the party’s real agenda is to destroy the Maori seats. For fear of being outdone Rodney Hide in a flight of fancy and a fit of rhetoric that will defy all sorts of psychologists has wandered around our country trying to find suitable Maori candidates to represent the ACT colours in the Maori seats. No doubt of course a number of ne’er-do-wells might be attracted to that cause. Both the National Party and the ACT party say something to an audience in order to capture its attention but deep down they propose to do something quite different in the unlikely event that they capture the benches of Treasury. Of course that remains a fantasy and all the froth and all the shenanigans up and down the country will not trick the country. 
Let us also study what has been the response from those parties in relation to Dr Cullen’s brilliant decision to bring back rail into public ownership. Not only has he presided over a handsome level of investment in terms of ONTRACK and the infrastructure but he wisely concluded that those sunk costs would release better value by the State re-acquiring that asset after it had been rorted and destroyed by the Fay Richwhite cabal—and fortunately some of them faced virtual charges from the Securities Commission. Secondly as Toll has suffered all sorts of financial woes in the sharemarket of Australia Dr Cullen had the opportunity to engage in a set of negotiations and now Toll is firmly in the grip of the Crown’s commercial route. 
The public love the decision to bring back rail into public ownership despite the best efforts of John Key to complain and show that he actually is not possessed of the facts but is just stirring things up. Bill English has been secretly threatening to sell it at the moment National has an opportunity to occupy this side of the House. Of course he will get the superannuation before that happens. So those members have to overcome the difficulty that the public approve of these investments. Has a backward step emerged in terms of international travel since we acquired Air New Zealand? No. It was a fantastic commercial intervention. Are we not going to create a great opportunity for a more efficient transportation system with vessels plying their trade around the coast of Aotearoa and trains travelling smoothly and efficiently serving both the private and the public good? And of course planes largely owned by the State will be trading and moving people around from our country to the next country. 
The reason those members do not like that is that at a deeper level they do not want the public to continue to own these assets. Sooner or later we will have the debate as to whom New Zealand wants to back—those who want to treat the system of Government and our society at large as if it were one large firm or those who see the balance the leadership amidst considerable adversity taken by our side of the House and who realise that firms do serve private purposes very well but that they also must fulfil a public function.