Mackey Moana: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Mackey Moana: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:637;Page:7477] 
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 When I finished up my speech last week I was talking about National’s sudden change to style over substance and about the blatant plagiarism of style from David Cameron in the UK and the blatant plagiarism from Mark Latham of the Australian Labor Party in the Burnside speech. I understand that tomorrow Mr Key is off to Gisborne again. Of course National had its 3-day caucus meeting in Gisborne. They swanned in told us how bad we have it in Gisborne and what a sorry state we have it in and then hermetically sealed themselves inside the Emerald Hotel which is a hotel and conference venue only recently opened—like so many other developments in Gisborne that were inconceivable until Labour came into Government. They came down and told us how bad we had it and what a sorry state we were in and they did not bother to go and talk to anyone about it. They got a lot of criticism for that so now they are going to have to come back and talk to some of the stakeholders in Gisborne. 
John Key is a man who obviously never went to Gisborne or the East Coast when his party was last in Government when unemployment hit 22 percent in Gisborne and when surveys showed that tourists were staying away because they were afraid to come to Gisborne because it was regarded as a place high in unemployment and crime. I could not put it any better than our mayor Meng Foon did in his letter to the Prime Minister at the beginning of this year. He stated: “I write to convey my appreciation of all your Government’s policies and the funding support you have given to our region over the past few years. Your Government’s support has certainly given us economic transformation.” I could not put it any better than that. 
Of course we still have problems but we do not need someone with no knowledge of our district swanning in from Auckland to point out what is obvious to those of us who live there every single day. Every community in this country has problems and I am sick of our community being constantly singled out and being defined by the negatives when I am sure that if Mr Key looked around his community in Parnell he would find that many many problems exist there also. I say to the National Party that it is easy to criticise and point out problems; it is far harder to get results as this Labour-led Government has done. 
I want to say three things to John Key who is becoming “Mr Everything to Everyone” and “Mr I’ll Tell You Exactly What I Think You Want To Hear” even though he contradicts himself constantly. He told Maori at Ratana that he wants more dialogue and then decided that National’s policy on the Maori seats is that it will not consult Maori at all. Even Dr Brash said he was going to consult Maori on the Maori seats policy. No John Key does not need to; he is not going to consult them at all. I say that I believed the Maori Party when it said it thought the National Party was going to vote for the Foreshore and Seabed Bill. I believe the Maori Party now but of course then John Key went to his caucus and they focus-grouped it and now they have found that it might not be as palatable. So rather than saying he had told Maori that but now he disagrees he said he had never said it. Maybe he was just being polite—as he was to Dr Michael Cullen in their meeting. 
I want to say to John Key that if he is going to visit the worst streets of Gisborne—and I am interested in what streets he thinks are the worst—I want him to be honest and tell any Housing New Zealand Corporation tenants whether he is going to put up their rents. He should not go in there play volleyball with the kids and take one of them for a ride in his limousine then not tell them—and deliberately mislead them—about the fact that his party’s policy could see their rents rise 140 percent like they did last time his party was in Government. I want him to apologise for his party’s policies of the 1990s that saw the percentage of children in sole parent families living in poverty go from 15 percent to 63 percent after the “mother of all Budgets” and saw the percentage of children living in families where an income-tested benefit was the main source of income go from 25 percent to 75 percent overnight. I want him to apologise to those families if he now cares about them so much. 
I want to tell him—and I want to hear him say it—that he is never ever going to implement those policies again that the National Party has admitted that those policies were a failure and that they were destructive to New Zealand and that they are never going back there again. But do members know I do not think we are going to hear that because as Chris Trotter pointed out—and it is a very good point—why are all the big right-wing backers of Mr Key and the National Party not crying out about his sudden lurch to the left? Why are they not very concerned about where this National Party is going? The answer is because they know it is not true. They know that what he is saying is not what the National Party will do if it gets into Government. 
I am very cynical because I think the reason the National Party members are talking about an underclass is not because they care about it; it is because they want to make the rest of New Zealand afraid of it. They want to make people—as Jenny Shipley said when she talked about Pacific Islanders crawling in people’s windows—scared about a growing underclass. They want to drive another wedge. They used Maori in the last election; they will use the poor and disadvantaged of this country at the next election. I say to Mr Key that at the end of the day it does not matter how nicely he says it. It does not matter whether he changes his tone. It does not matter what politically correct shirt he wears. At the end of the day it is substance and policy that put food on the table and a roof over people’s heads. The people of New Zealand deserve to hear the truth from John Key.