Mallard Trevor: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMallard Trevor: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 30 January 2014. Volume:696;Page:15723. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South): I want to take the opportunity in this debate on the Prime Minister’s statement to range over a few areas. The first one I would like to deal with is the increasing desperation of the Prime Minister to the point where he has returned Peter Dunne to his ministry and the error that he has made in giving Peter Dunne the responsibility for information security and the oversight of the Government Chief Information Officer. In the House today the Hon Peter Dunne refused to deny being the leak or the person who made the draftKitteridge report available to theDominion Post. I think 99 percent of New Zealanders who have considered this issue agree with the Prime Minister that Mr Dunne was the source of that leak or at least the Prime Minister in 2013. He thinks that these things might change over time.New Zealanders have to have confidence that the information that they are giving to the Government is going to be held properly secure and to do that the person who has political responsibility and oversight of the Government Chief Information Officer has to be seen to be above reproach beyond reproach. Peter Dunne cannot be in that category. So what we have now—I mean occasionally poachers turn gamekeepers. The example of Trevor deCleene in the taxation area is one that I know well. He was a lawyer who used every tax rort that was around and then became in those days an under-secretary in a Government and closed them all up again. That was good. But the difference with Trevor deCleene was that he fronted up. He was honest. He was straightforward. He admitted what he had been doing in rorting. What we have in the House today is Peter Dunne not being prepared to stand up and take responsibility for his actions in leaking or to deny it.I will say to Peter Dunne that I am 99 percent certain that he leaked it but I have worked with him for a long time and my experience with him is that he tells the truth in the House. If he came into the House and denied it I am sure the House would accept his word. But my challenge to him—and it is a challenge that we will be putting on a regular basis to him because the good thing about question time is the ability to hold Ministers responsible for their current responsibilities—is that we will be asking him why New Zealanders should trust him to keep their information secure when he leaked the draftKitteridge report into the Government Communications Security Bureau. It is a relatively simple area. What is a more important area and it sits in behind it is how it is possible that the Prime Minister gives information security to Peter Dunne.Sitting opposite is Maurice Williamson. Maurice has almost certainly forgotten more about information security than most people in the House have ever known. He is someone who has had a lot of experience in the area. I think he had one little lapse with information security himself. It must have been back in about 1990 when he left some floppy disks down the back of his couch.Hon Maurice Williamson: 1988.Hon TREVOR MALLARD: Oh no was it change of Government time—time of change of Government? The floppy disks had the National Party canvassing system on them and a letter that he wrote asking to be let off a speeding fine because of alleged urgent public business when he was in Opposition. The problem was that soon after that he became Minister of Transport and it was slightly embarrassing at the time. I think the member knows now to be very careful with what he does on couches to ensure that things do not get lost down the back of the couch. So that is one area.The one other area that has to do with Peter Dunne that I want to express some concerns about is his apparent reincarnation in the area of Associate Minister of Health and his responsibility for psychoactive substances. I think that if there was an area that the House got badly wrong last year it was that psychoactive substances area and it was to effectively decriminalise that. I voted for it so I got it wrong but so did Peter Dunne as the Minister responsible for the legislation. Over the break I did a half-page ad in theHutt News and included in it was a question about whether people thought that legal highs should be totally banned. The view was unanimous. There was not a person in the Hutt who returned that survey form who thought that the current law with legal highs was right. [Interruption] Sorry?Mike Sabin: The whole world says that.Hon TREVOR MALLARD: What I am saying is that we have got it wrong. I think that MikeSabin’s endorsement of legal highs which we are hearing across the House now is something that is disgraceful—something that is disgraceful. I think that area has to be reviewed. The law cannot last and I hope that we will get National Party support on that.I will now move to the question of the flag. As internal affairs spokesperson I have quite a lot of interest in this from a Labour Party perspective. I think the flag should be changed. I agree with my colleagues who know that John Key has brought it up as a diversion but the thing about diversions is that they work only when people do not work out it is a diversion. This diversion is so transparent—everyone can see through it—that it will not fool anyone. So we might as well get on with the debate. My view is that we should change. My view is that we can do it like we did with the national anthem. I do not know whether there is anyone else in the House who can remember standing up for “God Save the Queen” in the theatres. That is what we used to do. Most people will be surprised to know that “God Save the Queen” is still the national anthem for New Zealand. “God Save the Queen” is still one of the two national anthems for New Zealand. What we decided to do many years ago was to have two. Over a period oftime one of them fell into disuse—“God Save the Queen”. I think they bring it out every now and again when a royal arrives or when one of our ships goes into a UK port but that is about the limit of it.I think we should do the same with the flag. My view is that if we talk about the Olympics and we talk about national sporting teams of course they want a flag that does not look like Australia’s. I have been to enough Commonwealth and Olympic Games to know that we have got to have something that is distinctive and different. If the Returned Services Association in Lower Hutt wants to fly the current ensign—the current New Zealand flag—when it parades who should stop it?Grant Robertson: Still a diversion.Hon TREVOR MALLARD: I agree it is still a diversion. Everyone knows it is a diversion but let us just get on with the change.The last point I will make is that we are now seeing the effects in our economy and in our society of the education cuts presided over by Anne Tolley when she was Minister of Education and she cut early childhood education and when she was Minister for Tertiary Education and she cut at that time industry training. We are suffering as a result of that. Michael Woodhouse is having to work a little harder than he is used to approving all the immigration permits for people to come to New Zealand because 5 years ago the National Party cut the training that would have meant that Kiwis could do the jobs that Michael Woodhouse is now importing people from around the world to do.