English Bill: General Debate 
English Bill: General Debate 
[Volume:648;Page:17122] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Leader—National) 
: 
 I move  
That the House take note of miscellaneous business 
. When members of the board of trustees of Tiaho Primary School have been meeting this year over the sewage bubbling up in its school playground the lack of heating and the roof still leaking after 4 years three plans and $24000 worth of consultants—a huge amount of money for a school—they probably thought that the Labour Government for which many of them had voted was thinking about the education of their children. They probably thought that someone somewhere cared about whether their children were running through sewage after going out of cold classrooms with leaking roofs but they found out today that that is wrong. 
What was the Labour Government thinking about? Well the Prime Minister was thinking about how to smear the Leader of the Opposition. She got up in the House today after no doubt endless investigation and use of public resources to establish dates and shareholdings and she tried to smear the Leader of the Opposition only to find out that she was wrong. Both of the allegations she made were wrong. Did the Prime Minister do that deliberately in the hope of getting on TV while making some smear against a man who is subject to public scrutiny in front of I would have to say much larger crowds than she is getting every day? Did she hope that she could hit and run and that tomorrow it would be gone or did she just make it up? 
Either way the Prime Minister of New Zealand has no interest in the children of Tiaho Primary School because the other reason the children of that school and the children of Queenstown School—which needs five classrooms has spent 2 years trying to get them and has now been told that there is not enough money—cannot get funding is that the Government has committed $1.7 billion to buying back rail. There is no money to educate our children in decent facilities worthy of a developed country but there are hundreds of millions of dollars to pay a premium as Dr Cullen calls it to Toll Rail to line the pockets of its Australian shareholders just so that he can buy rail in an election year. 
You see the boards of trustees of Tiaho Primary School and Queenstown School know what it is like to go through the grinder. They have to justify every cent and go over it again. They had 40 meetings in order to get their concerns in front of the Ministry of Education which then said it did not have $20000 $30000 $40000 or $100000. But if one goes and spends $1.7 billion on rail then one does not need to know anything about whether it will make money what the return on capital is what the premium was or whether the last investment one made in rail in ONTRACK is even working because the Auditor-General says it is a mess. That is why Labour is going down the tubes. Every day hard-working New Zealanders are out there trying to keep to the rules in order to get the cash to educate their kids while those members opposite are spending billions on trying to garner a couple more votes and 2 more days’ worth of headlines. That is the reason they bought New Zealand rail. 
There has been no explanation of why the Government has bought New Zealand rail but I can tell members this. The plans for why Labour bought rail are less detailed less thorough and less well-thought-through than the plans for Tiaho Primary School to get its sewerage fixed. I challenge the Prime Minister to come to the House tomorrow and prove me wrong. The board of trustees of Queenstown School has tried much harder to be responsible over the use of $100000 of public money than the Labour Government has over spending $1.7 billion according to Helen Clark’s calculations today.