Key John: General Debate 
Key John: General Debate 
[Volume:647;Page:16684] 
JOHN KEY (Leader of the Opposition) 
: 
 Desperate decaying Governments do desperate decaying things when they are trying to cover up for failure on their part. Today in question time the Prime Minister produced a letter she had written to my office pleading with the National Party to support a new piece of legislation that would help with the problems occurring in South Auckland and with regard to gangs in relation to our criminal justice system. She asked whether I could write back to her by 27 June 2008—just 9 days after the sending of the letter—to confirm whether National would give that support. The fact that the Government could introduce that bill in its own right without us makes that unnecessary. Well the Prime Minister will not have to wait for long because I tell her the answer is yes we will be supporting it. Yes we will be supporting it because it is our policy. 
Hon Phil Goff 
: You don’t have any policy. 
JOHN KEY 
: By the way I tell Mr Goff it is a very tiny part of our policy because it is only a couple of lines long. 
But here is the interesting bit. Why is the Labour Government a desperate decaying Government? It is because the Government passed that measure through Cabinet not yesterday or a few Mondays ago but on 9 July 2007. The Government has taken a year to drag it out of Cabinet; Mr Goff is very embarrassed by that. And we would have thought the Government would have the decency to get out the twink because at the top is written: “The Minister of Justice: the Hon Mark Burton”. Well no he is not the Minister of Justice actually; he has gone from Cabinet. You see the members on that side of the House are in damage control and they are so desperate to look as though they have answers that they are trolling through the Cabinet papers to find stuff they thought they might possibly do. They have done lots of reviews and had lots of suggestions but they have put nothing in action—and that is the truth of it. We have a terrible situation out there; we have communities in crisis. They are looking to the Government for action but the action has not come. It did not come in 2000 or 2001. It has not come for 9 years and I can tell members of this House that people have given up on Labour. They have given up on Labour. 
On 8 June a man was shot dead in his shop—Navtej Singh was shot dead while doing his job. That is what he was doing. And he was not shot dead in the sense of being murdered; he was executed. He was executed for doing his job—because he had given those people what they wanted—in a cold-blooded gutless act. That is what actually happened to Navtej Singh and now we have a situation where a community is devastated. But he is just one of three people in 9 days who have died in Counties-Manukau in three separate incidents. Navtej Singh is not a statistic; he was a person. He was a father he was a husband he was a son—and he deserved better than to be shot. He deserved to be given protection by a Government that could have done more than just have reviews and interdepartmental working-groups and that put together action plans without ever putting those actions into place in the community. 
The tragedy for Navtej Singh is that he was a man in this regard. He believed in everything the National Party believes in. He used to get up at 4 o’clock in the morning to go and work in his first job. He worked till late at night in the liquor store he owned. He was a family man and a father of three. He was a loving man. He cared about his parents. He believed in New Zealand. He came to New Zealand to make a better life for himself and to play a part in this country. He was honest he was law-abiding he was hard-working and he did not get protection. 
Today I asked the Prime Minister a pretty simple question about whether she was prepared to back some other parts of National’s policy that she will no doubt be writing to me about next week. That was in relation to army-style camps for young people because we are right when we say those camps are needed. The Chief Youth Court Judge Andrew Becroft describes the sorts of people who could go on those camps as being “unexploded human time bombs” and he says there are 1000 of them out there. Well the Prime Minister told us today—with a straight face I might add—that things are not getting worse when it comes to youth crime in South Auckland. That is rubbish. The statistics do not back that up; neither do the people in the community who say that this is just business as normal. People are hanging around. People are terrified. The situation is a disgrace.