Peters Winston: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Peters Winston: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:623;Page:18163] 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First) 
: 
 Like last year we were saved by a gracious providence—the bell went. We just saw an example of starting the year with a hiss and a snore. What was remarkable about that speech was that a number of members of his own side and around this House including the ACT party had a look of disturbance disillusionment dismay and disbelief. Any moment now I expect Don Brash to make a speech on immigration. Any moment now I expect him to go out there and say that he by some road to Damascus experience believes what New Zealand First believes on immigration—that is what the past two Orewa speeches were about and that is precisely what the law and order speech was about. Who campaigned on those three issues in 2002? We did! We spoke of three things that in 3 years we would fix up and the great thing is now we have three-quarters of Parliament agreeing with us—just like that. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: You don’t need us! 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: Excuse me! Anybody who even dreams of a National Party Government in the future should wake up and apologise. He should just get real. I am hearing Don Brash articulate polices that remind me of Brian Mulroney and Kim Campbell in Canada. They in one election went from 169 seats out of 295-seat Parliament down to just two seats. They used to be able to fill an airline and after that they had to come on a tandem bike to Parliament. That is the kind of turgid nonsense that I am hearing—failed policies. 
This country needs solutions not failed right-wing policies that have been tried in the past. Did members hear the Orewa speech about the domestic purposes benefit? Now I cannot disagree with that speech in the case of a number of domestic purpose beneficiaries but we have to ask ourselves this one question: if it is right to condemn that sort of thing in society where was the man who headed the Reserve Bank who had prudential supervision of the BNZ when it ripped off the taxpayer to the tune of $2 billion? Where was the man who had prudential supervision then? When did he raise one finger? We did not hear a mutter a murmur or a syllable. [ 
Interruption 
] Is it not amazing? When he had the job the Labour Party appointed him. 
Hon Dr Nick Smith 
: But you supported him. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: “Young Nick” does not learn. He never learns even though he has been here for a long time. I campaigned for him in 1990. He was very young. I thought he would have actually learnt something in the intervening 16 years but he has not. 
We have here a most amazing circumstance. Don Brash seems to want to destroy his party with the same policies that the Canadian Progressive Conservatives tried and which destroyed them. 
Stephen Franks 
: You just said they were yours. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: Order! 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: No I do not want to be heard in silence. I am happy to debate with these people. It is like taking candy from a baby. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: That is right and the member advised me of that beforehand. The only reason I am interrupting is that the member is interjecting in the second person. That is his final warning. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: I was taking about failed fiscal policies and failed right-wing policies of the type that his party introduced under his leader Mr Roger Douglas. Is he still a member of the ACT party? I do not think so. 
Hon Member 
: No. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: I am advised that he is not. Let me ask the House my colleagues the last few remnants of the ACT party over there and Don Brash this one question. How come Australia has grown by 35 percent more in real terms since 1984 than New Zealand? 
Hon Ken Shirley 
: They haven’t had a Labour Government. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: Yes it has. For most of that time Australia had a Labor Government. Again the member has his history wrong. Has he never heard of Bob Hawke or Keating? 
The sad thing about right-wing members today of course is that they are shadows of their former selves. They are not in great shape. Apparently the new dictum in the National Party is that if women members disagree with their leader they are gone by lunchtime. That is what happened to Georgina te Heuheu. Lynda Scott disagreed and she was gone. Now poor Katherine Rich is gone. All she did was say: “No Don you’ve misinterpreted the research.” But then again I know—because my information sources are pretty good—that National is a deeply divided party. It has three factions and I can tell members who they are. Would faction 1 please put their hands up now please? I have no difficulty working that out. How do I know? Because I say to “Young Nick” I keep my ears open. That is what politics is about. 
I have listened to members of both Labour and National in the past weeks. They appear to have decided that the institution of motherhood is some sort of evil. On the one hand Labour members say that we should solve our labour shortage by sending mothers back to work while National members have proposed punitive measures to ensure that women are not lying around slacking in the home. That is how old and tired those members are in their thinking. New Zealand First says that of all groups in our society it is mothers who make the most valuable contribution to New Zealand. We stand firmly on the side of mothers. 
Hon Member 
: And grandmothers. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: And grandmothers. We think they deserve more than being just a cheap source of labour for big business or being whipping persons for failed politicians of the 1980s. 
But I come back to my point. When the prudential supervision requirements were there in 1990 what did the man do? He was in charge of the Reserve Bank. When will some journalist do his or her job and ask him? Surely they could write that—[ 
Interruption 
] Oh he is happy to answer. Why did he not answer? It is OK though to attack domestic purposes beneficiaries. If exploitation is going on and if people are cheating then we in New Zealand First agree—but we saw real cheats. [ 
Interruption 
] We saw people who cheated billions from the economy and unlike that party we sought to do something about it. [ 
Interruption 
] The National Party policy was to give him a knighthood unlike the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition— 
Gerry Brownlee 
: Take 2! 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: Gerry Brownlee is the man whom faction 2 says should be the leader; the man whom National members say has got the X factor—the ability to confer to communicate and to somehow empathise with people. 
Hon Jim Anderton 
: How many in that faction? 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: There are three in that faction but with Gerry there it looks like five. 
We know that bringing up children is a valuable time-consuming and often thankless task. Although it may not receive monetary rewards it is hugely valuable to our society. Mothers make up a huge proportion of the voluntary workforce in our society. They support their children’s education sport and cultural activities and a myriad of other endeavours. They fill the role of nurse taxi-driver— 
Stephen Franks 
: Especially the ones at the TAB. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: Here comes the ACT party’s true side. He thinks that all the mothers are at the TAB. 
Hon Member 
: His mother might be! 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: Yes his mother might be. What a sour acerbic look at society that is! I hope the ACT party never gets into power. But there is no chance of that—it will be gone by election time. 
Neither this Government nor the National Party truly values these people. We in New Zealand First say that if mothers want to work then that is fair enough but there should always be a choice and never an obligation. It is not the role of mothers to fill a labour shortage and it is a desperate Government that knows nothing about families that promotes such thinking. Thank God there is one party in this Parliament that cares about mothers and values what they do in our society! New Zealand First is that party. 
What we heard today from Helen Clark was a facade that was constructed around the Government’s so-called economic management. May I ask just one question of all New Zealanders? When is an economic boom not really an economic boom? I will tell members. It is when nobody but a select few get to benefit from it. That is the boom we are living through at the moment. The only thing is that most New Zealanders cannot feel taste or even hear it. Most of them are going backwards and we know that is a fact. How have real wages moved in the last 5 years? Well they have not moved at all. Some people have made a fortune in the last 5 years but for the ordinary New Zealander—the blue collar worker the hard-working person who makes up the biggest proportion of our society—there has been nothing whatsoever in the main. The Prime Minister was talking about all the indicators and about how good things are. Do members know that we have a balance of payments crisis of $7.4 billion coming by June of this year? 
Hon Brian Donnelly 
: How much? 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: It is a $7.4 billion balance of payments crisis—the worst we have ever had—and she is talking about these profound indicators. The fact is that we are now 37th in the world in per capita incomes. This is from a party that came to power saying that within 10 years it would restore New Zealand to the top 10. Top 10 of what—because it ain’t the First World and it ain’t the OECD. She has given up any hope of that. Then most profoundly today she said that we have a marvellous savings record. She cannot be talking about New Zealand. We do not have a marvellous savings record. This of course is the same person who along with her colleagues went out in 1997 and campaigned for all she was worth to stop a compulsory savings regime being brought to this country—something that would have helped women workers in particular. Today Labour members say: “Oh we’ve racked our brains and we are struggling to find new ways of encouraging people to save.” 
Stephen Franks 
: We supported it. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: Well thank God that member made some sense that time. 
The main point is this. Since the Labour disaster of 1984 of which Helen Clark was a member and so was Mr Cullen Australia has performed over 35 percent better than New Zealand in real terms and even Australia says it can do better. What fascinates me about Dr Brash of course is that he is starting to use these Australian figures but he never tells anybody that he agreed with Mr Douglas. He said in 1987 when Bruce Townshend died: “No I can’t possibly stand in that by-election if there is one. I would feel like a hypocrite. I agree with Roger Douglas.” That is what he said. Now he is trying to tell us to look at Australia because it is a good benchmark and we should follow its policies. Well none of Australia’s policies are in any way remotely like Dr Brash’s policies—none of them. When did he campaign for compulsory savings? Australia has that. Australia has just by way of example 75 different mechanisms to help exporters. What have we got here? Not one. That is why we are doing so badly. That is why we have people leaving in their droves to go to Australia. In Australia people get paid First World wages and here in New Zealand we replace them with people from the Third World—as if we need more taxi drivers lining up around our airports! 
People also know that despite the so-called economic boom many people on hospital waiting lists are dying. Here is an example of the most cynical Government that the Labour Party has ever produced in this country and I will tell members why. In 2002 more than 1000 people on hospital waiting lists died. By August last year 1200 people on hospital waiting lists had died yet the Prime Minister boasted today of a 40 percent increase in expenditure since Labour came to power. The only problem is of course that the waiting lists are longer than they have ever been despite being rejigged and reconfigured. 
The second thing is that fewer operations are being performed now than before they spent that money. Do members know why? Because they decided to spend the money on the bureaucrats and a whole lot of district health boards—21 of them—all running around doing the same thing in a country the size of New Zealand. Now the Treasury papers reveal that waiting lists are longer. I ask this of Dr Cullen and Helen Clark. If the Government has that sort of surplus and thousands of people are dying unnecessarily how does that make them feel? How do those members feel when they know full well that those people could be alive today? Thousands of people are dying unnecessarily because the Government wants to have a huge war chest for the 2005 election. How cynical is that! I hope some of those Labour Party people out there who do hold constituency clinics have a chance to meet some of their constituents who are on hospital waiting lists. They number in the thousands. 
Government Member 
: No. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: Yes they do especially in Rotorua. Do members know how many people on waiting lists in Tauranga died last year? Sixty-three people on hospital waiting lists died. 
Heather Roy 
: How do you know that? 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: I asked the hospital board. How does that member find out? What a curious question! Is it a fact or not? Sixty-three people on waiting lists in Tauranga alone died last year. 
Before I close this speech I want to say that really the 2005 election campaign is under way now. I hope this campaign is met with fair reportage from a certain section of society called the media. The media should expunge from its mind now any idea that this election will be a two-horse race. That would be a gross misrepresentation of how the election will pan out. I make no bones about it. We believe that New Zealand First will perform in 2005 like no other party would ever believe we could perform. Our now thirteen MPs will become legion after the next election and I want the media to get their people to give us a fair go. I heard  
Morning Report  
this morning for example going on about Helen Clark’s speech. So was the  
New Zealand Herald  
yesterday. Did members hear about a universal allowance in that speech? No. But apparently the  
New Zealand Herald 
 gave it the front page yesterday—and it was not there. Today on  
Morning Report 
 minute after minute and hour after hour was devoted to that speech. Where was the vision? Where is the comparative future that our young people might have as against Australians Europeans or America or for that matter Singapore or Taiwan? It does not exist. 
Every time I come back from Australia I wonder what is going on with New Zealand. We are not doing anything like we used to. We are not building anything. We have a huge war chest of money saved by the Minister of Finance yet from Orewa yesterday I was travelling at 5 kilometres an hour most of the time. That happens every day now. There has been no investment no roading no infrastructure and not one new business of any size at all since 1984. Labour members sit smugly and think they will win the 2005 election. Like hell they will! But then again they have some good news—nor have they over there. In 2005 the deciding factor will be New Zealand First. I seek leave to table my amendment to the amendment. 
Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: Leave is sought to move the amendment. Is there any objection? There is not. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: I move  
That the amendment be amended so that 
—[ 
Interruption 
] No you did not. 
Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: I did not hear anybody object. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: We cannot have a leaderless rabble like that. They have to be faster than that. 
Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: Mr Brownlee can I just clarify this. You said you objected before Mr Peters moved his amendment. Is that correct? 
Gerry Brownlee 
: That is right. I understand that Mr Peters sought to table his amendment. I cannot see what the point of that is because we are obviously not going to vote on it. 
Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: Mr Brownlee has indicated that he raised an objection before the member asked. I accept his word on that. I did not hear it for the— 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: I sought leave to table this amendment. I was asked by the National Party to read it I thought so I started reading. [ 
Interruption 
] Someone asked me what it was about so I said I would read it. 
Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: Yes that is true. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: I seek leave now. 
Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER 
: The member is seeking leave to table his amendment. Is there any objection? There is.