Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:615;Page:11016] 
Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Debate resumed from 12 February. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First) 
:  
I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. You will be aware that we do not have the full complement of 13 speeches in respect of this matter and I therefore seek leave to amend the original motion in the following way. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: Leave is sought to move an amendment. Is there any objection to that course being followed? There is not. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: I move  
That the amendment be amended by omitting all the words after “this House has no confidence in the Labour-led Government because” and the following words inserted: “that Government has no policies to raise New Zealand’s living standards back to the mid part of the OECD; it complacently accepts more than 300000 working-age adults being dependent on benefits and it continues down the dangerous road of promoting policies commenced by Labour and continued and promoted by National that treat New Zealanders differently on the basis of their race. 
” 
Mr SPEAKER 
: The question is that the amendment to the amendment be agreed to. 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE (Leader—ACT) 
: 
 If the House is prepared to allow the New Zealand First member to move such an amendment on the basis that there are no other speakers I have no other speakers and I seek leave to also move an amendment somewhat shorter. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: Is there any objection? There is objection. 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Deputy Prime Minister) 
:  
It is clear to us that New Zealanders face a choice. We can go forward on a path of progress and cooperation or we can go back to the divisions and extremism of the past and the not too distant past at that. This Government stands squarely for progress and cooperation and we have the numbers and the achievements to demonstrate it. We have had an economy over the last 3 years growing faster than the OECD average. We have been catching up on the OECD for the first time in a very very long time. As a result we have the lowest unemployment that we have had for many many years—more New Zealanders in work and fewer New Zealanders out of work than we have seen since the mid-1980s. We have restored the pension after the savage cuts carried through by National and New Zealand First and we put in place a funding arrangement to secure the pension for the baby-boom generation. 
 In health we have restored partially elected health boards we have more doctors more operations more patient satisfaction and a health system that is respected. In education we have increased enormously the number of people in tertiary education. In industry training we have increased the funding for low-decile schools. We have improved standards across a whole range of areas of achievement and of course household income has risen in part because of that rising employment. 
Yes we face problems. We have problems with a rising dollar largely caused by the falling dollar in the United States. Why is it falling? It is falling because President Bush is following National Party policy of tax cuts and spending increases and therefore large deficits. We have the problems of the foreshore and seabed where extremists at both ends are trying to wind things up and make life difficult and as nature has demonstrated in the last couple of days from time to time we always face weather problems in this country. 
However this picture of progress and cooperation is anathema to Dr Brash and National. Dr Brash is now some kind of pseudo-intellectual Mr Bean wandering through the world of politics falling over everything in sight and determined to destroy. National’s new agenda is based around so-called race-based policies. The only race-based policy I have heard in recent times is one that states that rights that are held by Maori should be abolished because they are held by Maori; rights that are held by anybody else should not be abolished. That is a race-based policy. 
But when challenged to say which policy he is talking about Dr Brash can come up with no more than trivial examples and he is usually wrong. So-called tangi leave does not exist in the bill—an invention of his own limited mind. When he talked about customary title conferring veto power in the Government’s proposals he was wrong and was laughed at by the lawyers representing the Maori participants in the debate. 
When it comes to education he said things were all right there because there is choice. If there is choice it would cover anything in terms of so-called race-based policies. In fact it is about decile funding. It is funding for low-income areas and it is funding for people who need assistance to achieve better. What does Dr Brash want? Does he want a nation of illiterate and innumerate people—an underclass that is overwhelmingly brown by the mid-21st century? Is that the society he wants to create instead of the 1950s English society he seems to want to recreate? 
National in Government accepted decile funding. It carried it through. At times National even claims it invented it. He then talks about the fact that there are some scholarships only for Maori. There are a few—he set up some of them as Governor of the Reserve Bank. The great majority of funding that Maori get in terms of paying their fees comes from iwi trusts etc. which is exactly the same as European Pakeha families paying for their own kids. But of course he says that Maori families should not be able to pay for their kids at university and polytech but Pakeha families should. If that is not a race-based policy then I would like to see one. 
With all these sorts of strange things coming from Dr Brash we have to question his inability to marshal any real evidence. He accepts any strange story and tittle-tattle about Maori that is running around so what is actually underlying all of this? What is going on in that vast dome of Dr Brash’s cranium that he seems to think that he can pick up these ideas? What is going on in there is like St Paul’s Cathedral. It is a big empty space with only ethereal sounds coming through it and a lot of dead bodies buried underneath it. 
One of our jobs is to describe those dead bodies because we have started to see the lids coming off the coffins in the last day or two. We have started to see the politically dead rising from their graves. Yesterday morning we saw Alan Gibbs. That was the man who said that as long as everything in our health system was market-based we would save $500 million a year. Eight hundred million dollars a year of extra spending later after failed restructuring and a total collapse of public faith in the health system National started to pour money into it to try to fix it up. If Alan Gibbs represents the future National wants to promote then we on this side of this House are feeling very very happy. 
We know what the agenda is: Mr Gibbs and National stand for privilege; they stand for tax cuts for the rich and for lowering everybody else’s incomes. As I have said so many times—but keep repeating it so it is worth repeating yet again—National believes that somehow or other to have the rich work harder they have to earn more and to have the poor work harder they have to earn less because there are two sorts of people in this world—the rich and the rest. National is for the rich and we are for the rest. 
Labour supports needs not privilege and those needs are many in our society. Mr Franks is not one of them. He objects to tax-funded people criticising the National Party and ACT. He is tax-funded himself of course though I suspect that is only a small part of the income he receives as a member of Parliament. When it comes into position the new register of interest will be very interesting indeed. 
What is Dr Brash’s actual policy? He has already said it many times. He has given many speeches and these will come back to haunt him. He believes in cutting the pension. He said it was too generous and National did it last time it was in office—even in its dying days in Government. He believes in raising the age for the pension so as to push it up beyond the next election for him. He believes in taxing the owner-occupied home—one of the very few people in this country who does. He believes in slashing benefits. 
He believes in cutting the holidays of the workers who have the least power to protect themselves. He believes in reducing workers’ rights and he believes in making workplaces less safe because it does not matter if ordinary working people get killed at work. They do not contribute to the wealth of this country according to Dr Brash. Only people like him contribute to the wealth of this country so his workplace should be made very safe indeed. 
He has a lot of questions to answer and as the answers come out people who thinkit is nice to have a go at Maori will start to say: “But he will have a go at me as well. He will cut my pension. He will make me work 5 years longer. He will cut my workers’ rights. He will take away the funding from my school. He will take away the funding from my public health organisation and I will be a lot worse off as a consequence of that.” Dr Brash stands for a peculiar form of elitism and privilege. We stand for need and if he follows his policy he will be dog tucker at the next election. 
PETER BROWN (Deputy Leader—NZ First) 
: 
 I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. We might have misheard but when Dr Cullen started his speech there was a degree of noise. We believe he said—and we take offence at this—that New Zealand First was part of cutting the pensions for the elderly. We are in no way associated with that and we strongly object. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: The member has made a debating point. It is not a point of order. 
Hon RICHARD PREBBLE (Leader—ACT) 
: 
 I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I thought of raising this point of order and stopping the Minister’s speech. Perhaps you might say that I should have done it then but I am raising this under Speaker’s ruling 48/5 which states that temperate and decorous language should be used with regard to persons outside of Parliament. I cannot raise this matter in debate because all our time is used up but I think it was wrong for the Deputy Prime Minister to say in the House that a person outside the House Mr Gibbs is in favour of privilege. I happen to know Mr Gibbs very well and he is a distinguished New Zealand businessman. Yes it is true that he wrote a health report for the last Labour Government but if the Deputy Prime Minister looks at that report again I think he will see that nowhere does it advocate privilege. I know that Mr Gibbs is on record many times as saying that he is personally very strongly opposed to privilege. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: That is neither intemperate nor indecorous and it certainly is not outside the Standing Orders. 
DONNA AWATERE HUATA (Independent) 
: 
 What is amazing to me is how a so quietly spoken and essentially dull a man as Dr Brash can excite such emotion. That was the most lively speech I have heard from Dr Cullen in quite a while but I must take issue with him when he claims that Dr Brash wants Maori to be illiterate because I for one know that that is certainly not the case. I have heard Dr Brash speak at a number of conferences. One was the Ngati Kahungunu economic summit and the other was the education summit and I thought that his prescription for Maori education and the development of the Maori economy was absolutely spot on. I thought at the time that he had the makings of being one of the most important politicians of the new millennium. He was not at that time a member of Parliament. 
The second time I heard him speak he was not the leader of the National Party but he certainly had the seeds of leadership within him as he spoke. He talked about education and the importance of choice. He talked about kohanga reo and kura kaupapa Maori as being examples of choice. I think the important point that he has made surely is that we must have policies that work for all and in his description of choice as one of the key ways we achieve that I certainly could not agree with him more. Where we have individuals who can make their own choices as in kura and in kohanga reo we know that people will develop. I thought also that when he talked about education and set standards in assessment I could not have agreed with him more. 
The other area where I agreed with him most was in his discussion on literacy and the importance of every New Zealander being able to read and write to world-class standards. For the first time in the 7 years I have been in this Parliament I heard a man talk about reading with as much passion as I do myself. I talked about closing the gap between Maori and non-Maori reading achievement. I heard him prescribe the way we could get teachers to do that—by offering standards by offering assessments by offering support to teachers and by retraining and all the rest of it thus bringing reading research right down into the classroom. 
When I heard that I was excited—as excited as I was when he rolled Bill English. But I have to take issue with the way he has marketed his policies to New Zealand and certainly with the way he has set the ground rules or created an environment where now there is an open season on Maori. I feel that in doing that he is taking us back to the 1970s and 1980s—an era that I for one never want to return to. If members can remember the mentality of the 1970s and 1980s they will know that it was an era where more New Zealand high schools had the Japanese language available than the Maori language where we had the regional superintendent of Auckland education saying: “Over my dead body will that barbaric language of Maori be introduced into any school in my region.” and where we had legislation like the Maori Land Act by which Maori land could be taken—just like that; at the whim of Government—if someone deemed it uneconomic. I for one never want to return to those days but I fear that is where Dr Brash is taking us. 
When Dr Brash said that there had been a huge pent-up feeling of frustration and anger on the part of a large number of people and that they were now saying: “Thank heavens! We now feel able to say we are concerned about this.” I fear that what Dr Brash is really saying is: “If you hate Maori please say so. Don’t feel frustrated about it. Let your feelings out. Don’t worry about what Maori think. Their feelings don’t matter.” I believe that the real story is how most Pakeha have maintained cultural separation after being here for so long—how they still cannot pronounce let alone speak the Maori language. 
I have to say to Dr Brash: “Maori are still fragile so please stick to choice in education stick to fixing the economy stick to freedom of choice and do not whatever you do allow Pakeha to give vent to their frustrations and anger.” Therein lies danger for all New Zealanders. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: The time for this debate has concluded. 
A party vote was called for on the question That the amendment be amended by omitting all the words after “this House has no confidence in the Labour-led Government because” and the following words inserted: “That Government has no policies to raise New Zealand’s living standards back to the mid part of the OECD; it complacently accepts more than 300000 working-age adults being dependent on benefits and it continues down the dangerous road of promoting policies commenced by Labour and continued and promoted by National that treat New Zealanders differently on the basis of their race.” 
Ayes 22 
New Zealand First 13; ACT New Zealand 8; Independent: Awatere Huata. 
Noes 98 
New Zealand Labour 52; New Zealand National 27; Green Party 9; United Future 8; Progressive 2. 
Ayes 31 
New Zealand First 13; Green Party 9; ACT New Zealand 8; Independent: Awatere Huata. 
Noes 89 
New Zealand Labour 52; New Zealand National 27; United Future 8;  Progressive 2. 
Amendment to the amendment not agreed to.Amendment not agreed to. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That all the words after “this House has no confidence” be omitted and substituted with the following words: “in the Labour-led minority Government because despite there being some positive elements in its programme its decision to allow the release of genetically engineered organisms exposes our health our environment and our economy to significant and quite unnecessary risks.” 
A party vote was called for on the question That this House has no confidence in the Labour-led Governmentbecause that Government has no policies to raise New Zealand’s living standards back to the mid part of the OECD; it complacently accepts more than 300000 working-age adults being dependent on benefits and it continues down the dangerous road of promoting policies that treat New Zealanders differently on the basis of their race. 
Ayes 49 
New Zealand National 27; New Zealand First 13; ACT New Zealand 8; Independent: Awatere Huata. 
Noes 71 
New Zealand Labour 52; Green Party 9; United Future 8; Progressive 2. 
Motion not agreed to.