Brownlee Gerry: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBrownlee Gerry: General Debate[Sitting date: 18 September 2013. Volume:693;Page:13467. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery): I moveThat the House take note of miscellaneous business. I have previously personally congratulated the Hon David Cunliffe on his elevation to the Labour leadership and I have now got the opportunity to publicly say to David Cunliffe “Good luck for the ride you have ahead.” I say that with some reservation because within 48 hours it looks very much to us as if it is just another David another day and another step to the left as we see the disloyalty in the Labour caucus slowly beginning to foment.I was just looking across the House at the front bench and thinking “What is going to be different next Monday? What is going to change next Monday?”. First I looked at the Hon Annette King and I thought that no you cannot bring back the man ban and get rid of Annette King. That just would not be compatible. Miss Ardern falls into the same category of protection. The man ban is on; therefore they survive on the front bench. Then you go across to the other end and you look at Mr Twyford and there is quite a dilemma in trying to assess what is going to happen because we saw on TV one shot of him with Grant Robertson at his headquarters on Sunday and then miraculously moments later he was in the shot with David Cunliffe in Auckland. So he has got a fifty-fifty chance of surviving.Then there is of course the inexplicable elevation of David Parker to the deputy leadership. We know what happened. There was a call for nominations for deputy leader and there was a deathly silence. And then David looked up from inside his papers and said “What about me?” and that was it. It was declared and the job was given to him.Then there is Grant Robertson. Well he is like Shane Jones. They both performed very well. They went around for 3 weeks saying what great buddies they all were how much they appreciated each other how much they admired each other and how muchthey wanted to work with each other. So he has to stay and so does Shane. Mind you I will say this about Shane. I think that if he just holds his water all is going to be his before too long. I think the way he connected with the public was quite extraordinary—quite worrying in fact for someone on this side of the House. He is a man of extraordinary talents when it comes to communicating with ordinary New Zealanders and I think that within time quite clearly many of his colleagues many of the 28 colleagues who did not vote for him are going to come back to him.That leaves just one possibility as a dead cert to be dropped off the front bench and that is my Canterbury colleague the Hon Clayton Cosgrove. This comes as a deeply disturbing thing for me because Clayton Cosgrove has spoken in the House 21 times since the beginning of 2012—not a bad sort of record for substantial speeches in the House. In every one of those speeches he has mentioned my name multiple times. It is almost a fixation that the poor man has. In the imprest supply debate he mentioned my name six times. In the Environment Canterbury bill debate it was five times. There are many threes there are many fours and there are many fives. I got mentioned six times in the Canterbury schools debate.But somewhat inexplicably he mentioned me five times in the debate on the State-owned energy companies and the delay of the sale of Mighty River Power—five times. Then when it came to the Mixed Ownership Model Bill in Committee I got nine mentions—nine mentions. These were 5-minute speeches and I took up most of them. In the Address in Reply debate this year he outdid himself. In the Address in Reply debate he outdid himself. It was a 10-minute speech and I got 11 mentions. That is one a minute. It is quite clear that the man thinks of nothing else but me. Clearly he is a man who does not have his eye on his policy portfolio issues and who has a certain fixation with me which is worrying because the deputy leader once had one of those as well.This is a party going to the electorate promising to raise taxes for New Zealanders promising all sorts of regulation of food price for example and regulation of taxi price and increasing tax rates on anything other than personal income tax. And then there is this extraordinary thing where Labour says that it is going to extend Part 6A the vulnerable worker provisions of the Employment Relations Act. I want to know whether Mr Cunliffe is going to extend Part 6A to his own caucus.