Hodgson Pete: General Debate 
Hodgson Pete: General Debate 
[Volume:631;Page:3145] 
Hon PETE HODGSON (Minister of Health) 
: 
 We have just heard from the man who would be the leader of the National Party but he has just given a really good example of why he is not the leader of the National Party. He is sitting next to Bill English who must have been thinking to himself: “Well I can do better than that.”—and in his speech just half an hour ago he did do better than that. It is not clear when Don Brash will stop being the leader of the National Party. The ground is still shifting in that caucus. The long and short of it is that Bill English’s supporters are not yet ready to pull their support from Don Brash because they do not have the numbers to defeat John Key. That is the guts of it. That is the prisoner’s dilemma the National Party finds itself in. Bill English supporters are still supporting Don Brash—whom they voted against when he came into the leadership role—because they do not have the numbers to defeat John Key. That is the guts of it and it will not get resolved until those two gentlemen over there come to a deal come to some sort of arrangement or understanding—cut something—and then there will be a change. 
But I can tell members what we do know. We know what Don Brash said when he became sort of famous. He said in October 2003: “And I don’t want us to be afraid of the electorate by watering down our message.” Big brave Don said for National members not to water down their message just because they might scare the electorate. Has he kept that idea anywhere close to his actions ever since? No chance! 
 That is the man who was going to sell assets to pay for his tax cuts if he had won the last election but we did not hear a word of it. That is the man who was going to give us part charges for hospitals and get rid of universality in primary health care to pay for his tax cuts but we did not hear a bit of it. That is the man who was going to have swingeing cuts to social services to pay for his tax cuts but we did not hear a word of that. In fact he did not even tell his own caucus that bit because Bill English Katherine Rich or whoever would not have let him do so. So that is a man who does not tell the whole truth. That is a man who is afraid of the electorate who waters down his message and therefore who shows to be someone who does not tell the whole truth. 
An interesting question arises about Don Brash. Does Don Brash bungle or does he have a deeper problem—have difficulty in revealing the full truth? There are quite a lot of examples of bungling. Last week’s example was a good one. Don Brash called a press conference about an email. He was the guy who called the press conference and he rocked up to the press conference he had called but without the email. That seems to be a bungle. It was written up as a bungle but it does start to make one wonder whether a deeper thing is going on with Don Brash—whether somehow in his psyche he thinks: “If I don’t bring the email to the press conference maybe no one else will either. Maybe the email doesn’t exist.” So we have a guy whom we know can bungle. It is like the situation in the election when Mr Connell from Rakaia said: “We’re going to log the West Coast.” Nick Smith from the same party said: “Oh no we’re not.” And Don Brash said: “Ah ah ah …” quite a bit. We know that was a bungle. 
But there is also the two-truth syndrome. The two-truth syndrome is starting to come out in Dr Brash. The classic one from the campaign was when he said within the marae that he liked Maoris but said as soon as he got outside the marae that he was going to be nasty to them. Where that syndrome really came to light was in the Exclusive Brethren revelations during the course of the campaign. Don Brash in his opening bid started off by saying that he could not remember meeting with the Exclusive Brethren. Within a day he said that he might have met with them once. Within about a day after that he said that he might have met with them once but certainly came to no deal with them. Then it became clear that he had met with them more than once and discussed a few things and then he said that he had met with them several times and discussed their support for the party. That is a man whom we now know—from the last week or two because it has been revealed by the police—was talking about a $1.2 million level of support for the National Party campaign but he could not remember. 
That is the man who does not immediately see the need to tell the truth; he does not immediately see the need to do that. It is a most unusual situation—that he continues to get this far into his political scene without yet being shopped for it. He has been shopped only for being a bungler but the underlying problem this gentleman has is that he does not want to tell the truth.