Williamson Maurice: Motions — Family Support Tax Credit—Increase 
Williamson Maurice: Motions — Family Support Tax Credit—Increase 
[Volume:638;Page:8344] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) 
: 
 All I can say after listening to that speech is how perverse the voters of Napier must be. We have just heard from Russell Fairbrother about how much the voters of Napier think this is a great Government. He said that everywhere he goes—to the Eastern Institute of Technology or to the breakfast for 150 builders—that is what everyone thinks. Well what happened at the last election? Napier was the safest Labour seat in the country—a seat that Labour had never lost for any reason—and a seat that good old Geoff Braybrooke used to hang on to by a majority of 15000 to 20000 and that member lost it. That member lost Labour’s safest seat. I have to say that if I ever lose my seat which is a similar Tory safe seat I will be so ashamed that I will walk on that day. That member comes into the House and says that everybody he talks to is in support of the Government so the loss of the seat can only have been a personal vote against him. It could only have been the result of a sheer abhorrence of the individual member if everybody in Napier thought things were going so swimmingly. 
I want to say today that my “gast” is completely “flabbered”. I am flabbergasted. I have been in this House for as long as you Mr Assistant Speaker—for 20 years—and I have never seen an Order Paper have as its No. 1 item a self-congratulatory notice of motion about how well the Government is doing. I want the people who are listening to this debate today to know that this debate is not about passing any family tax credit provision Working for Families provision or any other taxation legislation. We are not doing that today. Any members of my adoring drive time audience in Auckland who listen in to the radio regularly need to know that this debate is not about a bill. It will not matter whether people vote for or against the motion because the regimes have all been put in place after previous debate in this House and through legislative change. No for the first time in my knowledge of this Parliament we have a Government that is so bereft of any ideas that it has come up with a motion to congratulate itself. 
I could not believe that so I got out the Standing Orders. There is a very good section at the back that states the time each debate can take. I thought that that would be interesting to read because I did not know how long a Government motion debating timeslot was—how long each member could take and what the maximum time for the debate was. I know what the timeslots are for the general debate and for the first reading of a bill but I did not know about those for a motion. As I went through pages 119 120 and 121 of the Standing Orders I read about every sort of debate we can think of that this House normally has. I read about how many minutes each speaker gets—the first speaker gets this many then subsequent speakers get that many—and about the limit for the debate. But I could not find the speaking time for a Government motion. 
So I asked the Clerk. David McGee knows these things; he knows everything. He said that if I looked at the section entitled “General procedures” I would find a heading “Debates not otherwise provided for”. That is what this is today: a debate not otherwise provided for. That is how important this debate is. That indicates how many debates like this that there have been in the past. We have to look under the heading which I should have spotted “Debates not otherwise provided for”. 
What is going on here? I was a Minister in a National Government for 9 years and I tell members that the hardest thing I did during those 9 years was to go to the legislative committee every week—the Hon Lockwood Smith will remember doing this—and fight like stink to try to get some of our legislation into the House. There was so much legislation and there were so many bills in the backlog that Don McKinnon who used to be in charge of that committee used to say he knew I wanted to bring my maritime transport bill into the House. He would say he was sorry but I could not do so because there was no slot available. Dr the Hon Lockwood Smith would have rued the day too when he was trying desperately to get legislation into the House. What does a legislative committee meeting look like now? Do the members have a cup of tea and some biscuits? I bet there is not even a legislative committee now or if there is that the committee sits around and has a chardonnay and something to eat. 
A self-congratulatory Government notice of motion has got to the top of the A4 page that is all that is left of the Order Paper. Clayton Cosgrove will know how important some of the stuff is that is left on the Order Paper. I should hang on though because one of the items left on the Order Paper is Government notice of motion No. 2. So not only do we have this precedent but it will be repeated in the form of another self-congratulatory motion at some stage in the future. There are other things on the Order Paper like the Conservation (Protection of Trout as a Non-commercial Species) Amendment Bill. I understand that that is a very important bill. I know that most of the people in Pakuranga run down the street trying to touch the hem of my garment and asking me to please make sure that the Government gets the Conservation (Protection of Trout as a Non-commercial Species) Amendment Bill passed through. But not one person has ever in my life asked me to please get the Government to move a motion in the House that is self-congratulatory about something it has already done. 
Let us think of an analogy to this motion. Let us think about a sporting analogy. How would we feel if the Warriors after they won a match had a separate day when all they did was to give speeches about how well they had played the day before? 
Hon Mark Gosche 
: That would be good. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: Mark Gosche says that that would be good. No sportspeople in their right mind would spend a whole day telling everybody how good they were. They would get back to the training room and the weight room and get ready for the next match because as in any other field of human endeavour one is only as good as one’s last match. But that is not the case with regard to this Government. It has nothing left. That is what I want the honourable listeners to know about this Government motion. We have an Order Paper with nothing on it and a Government that has totally lost its direction and now the only thing the Government can do is to move as the No. 1 item on the agenda an unprecedented motion that says how good it is. 
I can see this becoming very much a trend. I think we should have motions to celebrate the second anniversary of such things and the third anniversary. Then we could bring in a whole lot of other things. We could celebrate the anniversary of the leaking of the local loop unbundling papers and have a motion in another year’s time to celebrate the 2-year anniversary of that. How bizarre will it become? Members in this House are all paid high salaries the running of this place costs a fortune and we are here using up those salaries and the time of this House to pass a Government motion. Let me read it for people; let me show them how vitally important it is. The motion stands in the name of the Minister of Finance the Hon Dr Michael Cullen. It states: “That this House endorses”— 
Sue Moroney 
: What’s your policy? 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: No I say to Sue Moroney it does not say: “What’s your policy?”. She should read it. It states: “That this House endorses the Family Support Tax Credit increase of $10.00 per week per child that comes into force on 1 April 2007.” In other words that increase is done and dusted; it is coming in no matter what happens.  
We should be debating the issues that this House should be focused on. The Minister of Health is in the House; we should be hearing from him as to whether he is prepared ever to let Dr Tony Bierre after what was found out about his behaviour near a contract again in respect of the Auckland District Health Board. At question time the Minister would not answer that. We should be using this time in the House to scrutinise people like Damien O’Connor about the corruption in the Department of Corrections and so on. But we have a Government that is all about care with no responsibility and absolutely no blame. That is what is going on in this regime. Now there is a smokescreen. Now the Government when it gets into real trouble moves a motion like Government motion No. 1 on the Order Paper and has it debated.  
I hope the news media absolutely cane the do-nothing Government because in the past if any self-respecting executive had come to this place with an Order Paper as thin as this one with nothing left the conclusion would be that the Government had run completely out of steam and had nowhere to go from there and that it was time to get the Government out. That is very clearly what this motion says to the country. It says the Government has nothing left but the Conservation (Protection of Trout as a Non-commercial Species) Amendment Bill and another notice of motion that is on the way to fill up the agenda even more. A 4-week adjournment is coming up when Labour members will all be off on their 4 weeks a year— 
Darren Hughes 
: It’s 3 weeks. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: Actually I say to Mr Hughes that if an adjournment goes from a Thursday through to a Tuesday and has 3 weeks in the middle he will find if he adds it up that it comes closer to 4 weeks than to 3 weeks. 
Darren Hughes 
: We start on Monday here. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: Oh yes. The member says he starts the holiday on Monday. The member started on his holiday at about Christmas time and he will not go back to work until the following Christmas. 
This motion is an absolute outrage. I have never seen one like it before and I cannot believe this Government has moved it.