Eckhoff Gerrard: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Eckhoff Gerrard: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:623;Page:18348] 
GERRARD ECKHOFF (ACT) 
: 
 I listened in vain during the Prime Minister’s speech and indeed since then to the speeches from members of the Labour Party for two little words to come from any member of the Government—any member whatsoever during this quite long debate. I have been waiting for the words “thank you” but I have not heard them. I will check  
Hansard 
 later but I have not heard those words come from the Prime Minister in any of her prime ministerial statements nor from any member of the Labour team to say “thank you” to the taxpayers of this country. 
They laud themselves for the massive surpluses they are now wallowing in; they seem to believe that those surpluses come from them. Well I have something to say to the Prime Minister and her people: they neither grow nor create; they merely take—and they take from the taxpayer. It would help just a little if they said thank you from time to time—thank you to people in the fishing industry or the forestry industry or the farming industry. They are the people who get out of bed in the morning go to work and create the wealth of this country. But I have never heard those words “thank you”. All we hear is: “We are going to take and take some more.” 
That is the theme of what I wish to say this afternoon in my speech and I make no apologies for bringing attention back to the issue of the Government taking more private property from landowners in this country. The Prime Minister confirmed in her speech that rural New Zealand to her is nothing more than a playground. She has determined that sometime this year she tells us legislation will be brought into this House whereby the Government will appropriate take or steal—regardless of what we call it—a strip of land from all of those who have a body of water on their property. 
But the Prime Minister says that the Government is going to be kind to landowners to rural New Zealand and will not allow a right to roam. Well that is wrong. I want to quote to the House the former Minister for Rural Affairs Jim Sutton. He was dumped because of the total lack of confidence rural people had in him. He said just 2 days prior to Christmas: “They”—that is the public—“will be able to come to the access commission or whatever we decide to call it and say: ‘We think there is a big demand to get access to this piece of bush or that piece of conservation land where there is no form of access now.’ ” That is what he said in an interview with the  
Otago Daily Times 
. There is no mention of water bodies there; it is about somebody going across private land to get to where he or she wants to go. Yet again we have been misled—some would say lied to—by this Government because once that legislation is passed it will take just 1 hour to push through an amendment at some stage to ensure that a right to roam does exist. So if anybody listening to this debate believes for one moment that the Government will keep its word in saying that it is just around a water margin that people will have this right to roam then he or she is wrong. 
I was delighted to see the Prime Minister sack—dump at least or certainly demote—Jim Sutton. As our rural advocate he was the man who promoted a right to roam; he is the man who is promoting this access commission this theft of private property; he is the man who stole carbon credits from farm foresters from the forestry industry; and he is the man who stood by and watched while accident compensation levies rose for example by 40 percent and he did absolutely nothing. 
But worst of all he stands by and watches the security of rural New Zealand diminish. What reaction has the Government had to the murder of Jack Nicholas or to the recent murder of that poor woman Mrs Morriss? It has taken absolutely no action at all. Well I suspect that at this next election the people of rural New Zealand will remember. The fact is security—the prime function of any Government—has been lost to rural New Zealand. Rural New Zealanders will remember and they will react on election day to that abuse—and that is all it can be called.