Parker David: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeParker David: General Debate[Sitting date: 12 June 2013. Volume:691;Page:11055. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour):National Mr Banks and Mr Dunne—the bad the mad and the sad. That is what this Government has become. We just had to put up with the Hon Tony Ryall accusing the Labour Party of having low standards. This is from the Government led by John Key who said that National would not go into Government with the Rt Hon Winston Peters and that it was going to bring higher standards to the Government.I want to deal a little bit with the scandal that has beset the Government and overshadowed its Budget for the last 2 weeks since the Budget. The Prime Minister after the leaking of the Rebecca Kitteridge report said that he wanted to get to the bottom of what had happened. We then had Mr Dunne refusing to answer questions but denying that he was the source of the leak.Since then the Prime Minister has tried to misrepresent the position of the Opposition and indeed the position of the media. I have got to say I have been a little bit sad at some of the somewhat misguided taking of that line by some in the media who have swallowed the line that the Prime Minister has dangled out there. The Prime Minister has tried to say that the Opposition has called for Andrea Vance’s sources to be disclosed. We have never done that—we have never done that. It was not us who used the police like the Prime Minister did in the tea tapes to get a warrant to go into news media organisations during the election and get information from them on the recordings of the tea tapes. It was not us in Government who used the Serious Fraud Office to use production orders against theNational Business Review to find information about the South Canterbury Finance debacle. It is us who have protected media freedoms and we have never once said that the information that Andrea Vance had should be disclosed by her. But what we have said is that the Official Information Act ought to be complied with. The Official Information Act ought to be complied with so that the emails from Mr Dunne are disclosed because there is no public interest in their not being disclosed. They are ministerial emails and they ought to be disclosed.We have a Prime Minister who said he wanted to get to the bottom of what had happened and who is now content not to have got to the bottom of the matter. Why? Because he wants Peter Dunne’s vote. It is the same lack of scruple that enables him to put up with John Banks who is currently on trial before the courts for electoral fraud where he is accused of filing a false declaration claiming anonymous donations that he actually personally received from Skycity and from Kim Dotcom. It is the same lack of standards that is applied by the Prime Minister there that allows the Prime Minister to say: “Look I haven’t read the police report. I don’t want to read the police report.” because he wants to believe that Mr Banks is a proper person to prop up his Government.So we have got John Banks in the dock we have got Peter Dunne having been stripped of all credibility and all of a sudden just because the Labour Party wants to get to the bottom of this we are accused of having some double standard. The Prime Minister then says: “Look it’s no different from Phil Goff disclosing things that have been leaked to him.”Hon Tau Henare: That’s right.Hon DAVID PARKER: And we have the National Government saying that that is right. It is completely different. It is completely different for a Minister to breach his duty of confidence than it is for the media or for the Opposition to disclose what has been disclosed to them. It is the proper role of the media and it is the proper role of the Opposition to disclose things that are embarrassing and show incompetence on the part of the Government. It is a completely different matter for a Minister to breach a duty of confidence. If the Prime Minister and the National Government do not understand the difference in that matter of principle then they are even more stupid than I thought they were. The reality is that they do understand the difference; they are just trying to obfuscate because underneath all of this is the desire of the National Government to hold on to its grasp of power which is reliant upon Mr Dunne and Mr Banks both of whom are disgraced.Then we could look at the third of the Government’s coalition partners which is the Māori Party. It is invisible—invisible today invisible virtually every day—but it is still propping up the Government. It is a disgrace.Lastly it is wrong that the United Future party is receiving political funding for its leader’s office when it has no registered political party.