Cullen Michael: Reinstatement of BusinessText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCullen Michael: Reinstatement of Business[Sitting date: 09 December 2008. Volume:651;Page:68. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Labour): Could I begin by congratulating the Leader of the House on successfully moving a motion and speaking to it which in the short life of this Parliament is a first for the Leader of the House. That is not to say of course that there were not a great deal of disasters along the way because we have seen already in the motion on urgency that the Government has had to change its mind—it has bills not yet drafted with titles not yet known and content yet unknown which are still being negotiated between the members of the various factions within the National Party.I want to say also that with the Standing Orders having changed some little time ago this is an important motion because it is constitutionally important. It is the incoming Parliament that determines whether to pick up the business of the outgoing Parliament not the outgoing Parliament that tries to determine for the incoming Parliament what is done. I have no objection to the matters that have been deleted from the outgoing Order Paper. The Leader of the House is quite correct that those matters do not need to be concluded any longer.But could I ask a few questions perhaps—and some of my colleagues might want to take part in this debate. We did offer the Government the opportunity to have the motion taken before lunch time. There would have been one very brief speech if that on it and it could have been passed. But for some reason the Government decided to move this motion in urgency as the first and most important item of business in urgency on the first real sitting day of the Parliament of this new National - ACT -Māori Party Government. This particular motion could have flown through the House at about 12.15 this afternoon with nobody even noticing. But that of course is the result of the rather strange way the National Party manages its business.First of all could I ask since the member who moved this motion asked me so many times about the Conservation (Protection of Trout as a Non-commercial Species) Amendment Bill what the Government’s position is. Will it be passing this bill? For week after week month after month I dangled this bill in front of the National Party Opposition. Almost every week those members bit. The little fly-fisher Dr Cullen pulled out his little rod and Mr Brownlee bit almost every week and I thought: “My God how am I going to hang on to this rod with Mr Brownlee on the other end of it?” Luckily he lacked the energy and very quickly let go again and he went into a sort of a quiescent state. So I would like to know whether the Government will be passing the Conservation (Protection of Trout as a Non-commercial Species) Bill.The second question is: what is the intention of the National Party’s coalition partners the Māori Party in respect of the Foreshore and Seabed Act (Repeal) Bill—a bill that the Māori Party consistently avoided putting to the House week after week month after month as a member’s bill even though it was the sole reason for the formation of that party? But when it came to the Order Paper it ran away so far inland indeed that it had to scale mountains to avoid the Foreshore and Seabed Act (Repeal) Bill. I am told that Mrs Turia was on television on Sunday saying that Māori own the foreshore and seabed—news I am sure to Mr Colin King. I can see his intelligent mien showing a great deal of interest in that prospect. It will be very interesting for him in the Kaikōura electorate explaining to people that Māori own the foreshore and seabed particularly because the relevant Māori disagree about where the boundary is between the various iwi within his particular electorate. That is going to cause a particular problem in that regard.Hon Tariana Turia: Oh how shocking.Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN: It is absolutely true I have to tell the member that there is a conflict over the rohe between Ngāi Tahu and the north of the South Island iwi in terms of those boundaries.Indeed what the member was reported as saying was that the only real issue now is what the conditions of access for Pākehā to the foreshore and seabed will be. So is that what this review is going to be about and will this bill be passed in this form with only relatively minor amendments? Is that what the brave National Party after all its talk on the Foreshore and Seabed Act is going to do or will it allow the processes that I have secured for Ngāti Porou—a very significant recognition of rights—to proceed? Mr Flavell thinks they are not significant recognitions of rights. If they are more than what is in that bill there will have to be something like freehold ownership and if that is what National is saying the outcome of this review will be it is going to be a very very short-term Government indeed because that is not what middle New Zealand thought it was getting when it voted for a change of Government but no change in policy.Finally there is the Education (National Standards of Literacy and Numeracy) Amendment Bill. What is going to happen to that? We are told that as long as parents are told by teachers how little Johnny is doing even if little Johnny is failing—all they have to do is tell them little Johnny is failing—productivity is going to magically rise in the New Zealand economy within a matter of months or at least in a very few number of years. So this bill is going to be crucial and I want to know whether this bill is going to be passed in the form moved by Mrs Tolley who at one of her first briefings with officials had to ask them: “What does a vice-chancellor do?” She asked this of education officials. She thought it had something to do with vice. She thought the vice-chancellor was the moral supervisor within a university. She asked what he or she does.We want to know whether this bill is going to be passed and if so in what form. On that note we are happy to support the motion.