Parker David; Tisch LindsayHon DAVID PARKER (Labour): I have already been contacted by a number of people who are absolutely disgusted that Murray McCully and the National Government claim that this Auditor-General's report exonerates them. I am going to go through a few of the exclusions from this report.David Seymour: I hope he's got some new material.Hon DAVID PARKER: These are things I have read since my first contribution. It is actually quite a long report; you should read it member for Epsom before you say stupid things. On page 4 of her report she says: It is not within my legal mandate to comment on or criticise the Government's trade diplomatic or animal welfare policy decisions." There is nothing in this report about whether it was proper to do a shabby deal to pay off a disaffected Saudi businessman. There is nothing in this report about it because it is not within the legal mandate of the Auditor-General to say whether that was a proper thing to do or not. She says it time and again. The next time she says it is on page 8 of the report where she says: "The use of a contract for services to resolve these matters was a decision made by Cabinet. I comment below on the quality of the Cabinet paper process but not on the decision itself." Again she is highlighting to anyone who reads the report that she is not commenting on the morality of paying off a disaffected Saudi businessman in order to get a free-trade agreement with Saudi Arabia. What she does criticise is the fact that the contracts did not set out what was actually going on.Next she says: "I was surprised that it was decided to use a contract with a private individual's business interests to resolve a diplomatic issue between governments. It is difficult to reconcile the words of the contract with the unstated objectives". She says: "The contract for services was a convenient mechanism by which the allocated $10 million later $11.5 million was put towards achieving those unstated objectives. It does not tell the full story." And the Government claims this exonerates it. The Government claims this exonerates it.And then there is this issue: McCully says he is OK because he has not committed a crime. He says he has not paid a facilitation payment. Do you know what sort of facilitation payment it was that the Auditor-General was talking about? She was talking about the sorts of facilitation payments that the Ministry of Justice explained are: "A 'facilitation' or 'grease' payment … a small payment made to a foreign public official to speed up a service to which the payer is already entitled." That was never the allegation. It was never the allegation. He has never been a public official. These were not small payments. It was a $4 million cash payment. It is not a criminal act facilitation payment; it is a $4 million payment to facilitate a free-trade agreement. It is still a payment that is wrong—morally wrong. Paying someone off who was not owed anything—$4 million in order to get out of the way of a free-trade agreement.Why did the Government do it this way? Well you know at the back of the report the Auditor-General has gone to the trouble of setting out how you have got to seek authority for different sorts of payments from Cabinet. She explains that if it is a compensatory payment of more than $750000 it has got to be approved by Cabinet and "In either case the payment must be endorsed by either the Crown Law Office or a court judgment." Neither of those things here—that is one of the reasons why the Government has been so unclear about what this payment was for.We now know—and it has dodged this for over a year—that there was no substantive cause of action that it did not have any legal advice either internal from the ministry or external to the ministry in support of the allegation that there was some legal risk to it. What if it is an ex gratia payment? An ex gratia payment she sets out of more than $75000 must be approved by Cabinet. Those members are hiding under the fact that this is a diplomatic payment that is beyond her jurisdiction to scrutinise and that therefore somehow what they have done is legitimate. It is legal but it is immoral. It is a facilitation payment that has bought off a wealthy Saudi businessman who had no legal claim against the New Zealand Government. It is shabby it is unprincipled and if we have reached such a low stage in New Zealand that a Minister has to be in the dock before he has to resign I think that is very sad. [Interruption]The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! No. [Interruption] Order!"