Bishop ChrisCHRIS BISHOP (National—Hutt South): Mr Speaker thank you very much. It's a pleasure to close the debate for the National Party in the adjournment debate. I want to start as the leader of the National Party did Judith Collins by saying thank you because sometimes we don't say thank you enough in the Parliament and we don't say thank you enough to the staff who work for us and to the essential workers as the Hon Carmel Sepuloni mentioned.Can I start by saying thank you to the messengers. They are in many ways the unsung heroes of this place alongside the Chamber staff. To the security who are here very late at night often sometimes after midnight and when we were going through the euthanasia and the abortion votes quite a lot later than that. I frequently leave this House at about 11.30 12 o'clock to drive home and the cleaners are just starting. They're not paid enough probably and they work through the night. They do a great job for us and my office is always spotless and the carpet in the corridors is always spotless.Can I also thank the taxi drivers and the Uber drivers who take us around the country. We don't have VIP cards in Opposition—well at least those of us who are not the leader do not—but I know they do a great job for the ministerial team as well. It's a sort of cliché but it's true: the taxi and the Uber drivers are the best litmus test for how things are going. The Hutt and City Taxis out in the Hutt do a great job. I always talk to the Uber drivers as well—they do a great job.Can I say thanks to the Copperfield's team who particularly keep me well lubricated and fed and thanks to the Bellamy's staff. One of the things that many MPs do I know is auction off Bellamy's lunches and dinners for local charities in their electorates. I do the same thing. I'm significantly out of pocket from this term in Parliament but the Bellamy's team do a great job. Of course led by Josh Ross from the Hutt—the executive chef there—and he always does great food for us.Can I say thank you to the press gallery. There's been quite a lot of criticism of the press gallery in the last few weeks—mainly in the valedictories—but actually the fourth estate is the critic and conscience of us here. And maybe sometimes they go too far and maybe MPs have things written about them that maybe they don't like very much but actually that's part and parcel of being in this place. We're paid a lot of money to act in the public good or at least try to act in the public good and we need to be held to account for what we do in this place—so thanks to the press gallery for doing that.Can I say on a personal note thank you to my office team: in the Hutt Dawn and Tanya; here in Parliament James and Ollie. Particularly during COVID and I know I probably speak for all members in saying our electorate offices and list MP offices really went above and beyond helping constituents not just essential businesses or those who wanted to be essential businesses in some cases but accessing support through the Ministry of Social Development as Minister Sepuloni made mention but also immigration support. There are some really tragic cases out there—really heart-rending cases that MPs have tried to help with but not always been able to successfully help. That's always the way with constituent cases but you try. Most of the time it's your office staff who do the trying for you. So thank you to them. They do a great job.No one's mentioned the Standing Orders changes yet as far as I know.Barbara Kuriger: Yep.CHRIS BISHOP: Oh I'm sorry. I must have missed that one. But I think the new Standing Orders are going to be good for the Parliament. Now I can't claim any credit. You sir can probably claim a lot—and thank you for your service to the Parliament. The new Standing Orders I think will improve this Parliament. Five o'clock on a Thursday sounds like a small change as a default sitting hour but I remember about 18 months ago talking to Sarah Dowie in this Parliament and I hope she won't mind me sharing the story. She couldn't get home to Invercargill on a Thursday night because we finished at 6—it's just the way the flights work. OK you might think that's OK and maybe she can go on a Friday. But actually when you add that up over a year three years that's a significant amount of time away from your whānau and really really tough for her and it really really affected her. I remember having the conversation. It wasn't actually here; it was in Wellington—and I remember talking to her about how there's got to be a better way of doing things. So we finish at 5 on a Thursday and we cut—an hour for dinner. How many other people take 1½ hours at dinner during their normal work week? Not that many people. I think we can go down to an hour. And if it means that some of the numerous—probably too many—cocktail functions around this place have to finish half an hour early well that's probably good for all our collective waistlines and all of our collective alcohol intake as well. That's not the world's worst thing.I think it's going to be good that Ministers appear before select committees more. My genuine feeling is that we do not hold Ministers and the executive to account enough in Parliament in the way that we should. If you look at overseas parliaments they put Ministers and the executive and the public servants through the wringer. We think it's acceptable for Ministers to turn up for an hour for the Estimates and an hour for the annual reviews with the departments each year. Overseas in Australia they'd have the departmental chief executives in for an entire day and they go through the Budget line by line on a forensic level and they examine what's going on. We don't do that here. And actually MMP was meant to be an accentuation in the role of Parliament and holding the executive to account and it has not worked out like that.Palmer's vision of an empowered Parliament holding the executive to account has not actually been borne out in reality. There's a lot of different reasons for that and I'm not making a party political point against Labour Party; that goes back a long way. I think that should change. I think Ministers appearing before committees more is a good thing and I think we can do more in relation to that. No Government wants to put Ministers up before committees that much but actually it's in the public interest that they appear more and that we scrutinise more and that Parliament has more power.Joint sponsorship of members' bills—that'll be good. And I've got to say I'm waiting on the automatic introduction of bills that have 61 members in support and advance or not. I think that's going to produce some quite interesting situations in the next Parliament and I think people will find that interesting. Just in my last three minutes let's talk about the last three years. They started with a lot of promise. I remember the night Winston made his fateful decision and I remember the few weeks before that when it was him saying Oh we won't do it like I did it in '96." Well OK it didn't work out like that. It did happen again. And I remember I was with Todd Muller actually interestingly and we sort of turned to each other and said "OK we're going into Opposition." I wasn't a Minister in the last Government but you know I really hoped that we would be returned. But we weren't. It started with a lot of promise. And I was not one who thought the Government was illegitimate because there's quite a few people who thought they were including those who are right-leaning supporters and voters. It is not an illegitimate Government. MMP was always going to produce an outcome when the party that polled second formed a Government. That was always going to happen. The only surprise is it took 21 years for it to happen. It's not an illegitimate Government but I do believe it's been a Government of failure. Remember the openness and transparency that was the key promise at the start? It didn't work out so well. We had the secret letter. We had the Clare Curran fiasco with Radio New Zealand and the secret meetings. We had the opacity of the Provincial Growth Fund. It's not a Government that's lived up to its promise on openness. Remember the housing crisis? I remember the 2017 campaign. The housing crisis was what it was all about. KiwiBuild's been a failure. Homelessness was meant to be cured by winter 2018; 18000 on the social housing waiting list. The State house sell-off was meant to stop. It hasn't. Hundreds of houses sold and millions of dollars spent on housing people in motels. We don't hear much about the housing crisis any more. In fact we don't hear lots about KiwiBuild any more—the policy that Annette King came up with on the back of an envelope with David Shearer on the way to the Labour Party rally. Probably a good idea to write policy a bit more sophisticated than that. We don't hear a lot about fees-free so much any more because fees-free was all about increasing participation. It didn't do that. It was very expensive. So instead we've just changed the criteria for success. Now it's about the money we spend; not about the number of people we get into our universities. Well if you change the criteria to be about money this Government will always win because they will always spend more. They will always spend more than National but the question is the quality of the spend. And I think if we're going to borrow intergenerationally as we're going to over the next few years let's borrow for intergenerational investments. Let's borrow for things that will have an intergenerational benefit. Let's do Mount Vic. Let's do the Terrace tunnel. Let's do the four-lane expressways and let's do the third and fourth rail line and let's build rail to the airport and let's do rapid transit. Let's get on with the transport projects this Government hasn't. In my final few seconds Mr Speaker thank you for your service and thank you to the Parliament."