Brownlee Gerry: General Debate 
Brownlee Gerry: General Debate 
[Volume:641;Page:10915] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (National—Ilam) 
: 
 If we were to typify New Zealand today we would have to say it is a country of very high interest rates where mortgage stress is causing New Zealanders a great deal of hurt where child abuse is absolutely out of control and where emergency rooms throughout our hospitals are overcrowded and people cannot get the service they want. This is a Government so disappointed with and unwilling to talk about its own performance that all its members could do in the last couple of days is come into the House and hack away at the knees of the National Party. 
Michael Cullen asked the question: “Who believes John Key will be the Prime Minister of New Zealand?”. I say that he should go and look at the polls—that is who believes John Key will be the Prime Minister of New Zealand and that will not change. So what is the plan when one’s policies do not work? What is the plan for the Government when it has spent 8 or 9 years making an absolute hash of it? What does one do? Well one starts to politicise the public service and turn it into some great arm of the Government and then deny anybody else any right to make a comment about it by altering the Electoral Act to prevent any criticism whatsoever of the current Government. That is the broad plan. 
One of the things we are most concerned about is the sham that is going on in the State Services Commission. This country has tens of thousands of State servants who do a good job day in day out regardless of their political persuasion and when they deal with other New Zealanders they do a good job without regard for the political persuasions of those New Zealanders. So why is it then that we cannot accept the need for the public service to be neutral? We know that Government members cannot accept that because they talk about it so very much. 
Let me build a bit of a picture. Firstly we had the situation where Minister Benson-Pope said: “I won’t have that woman in my office.” That comment related to the new manager of the Ministry for the Environment communications team. He conveyed that message to Mr Logan the chief executive. Mr Logan said: “What am I going to do now?” and he went to Dr Prebble who is the commissioner himself. The commissioner has said that he advised Mr Logan on how to handle this matter. Mr Logan said he told Dr Prebble of the instructions clearly given to him by David Benson-Pope. Time unfolded Ms Setchell lost her job and the whole ruckus started to arise about the interference of the Minister. 
Things got so bad in the middle of that that the State Services Commissioner felt the need to sit down in front of his computer and write an article explaining what political neutrality is and he published that article in the  
Dominion Post 
. The interesting thing is that when he sat there to consider this particular issue he forgot the most important fact in it. He forgot why the issue arose in the first place. He somehow seemed to think that the sacking of Ms Setchell came out of the sky somewhere—that there was no particular reason for it other than the fact Mr Logan had decided there might be a conflict. The reality is that it is not plausible for anyone to defend Dr Prebble on the basis that he simply forgot what happened. 
So here we have the State Services Commissioner who forgot the most salient fact in this matter now being required by the Government to lead an inquiry into what happened. The question that arises is: if as we were told in the House today by the Minister of State Services and by Dr Cullen this inquiry is into the handling of this issue by Mr Logan and it is occurring because the Prime Minister was unhappy that Mr Logan did not let the acting commissioner Mr Rennie know about David Benson-Pope’s intervention where does that leave Dr Prebble because he is a man who also knew? So here we have the adviser to the culprit. In other words Dr Prebble advised Mr Logan. Mr Logan told him all the relevant facts. Dr Prebble admits that. But now we have Mr Logan being investigated by Dr Prebble who knew all the time what was going on and advised Mr Logan on what was supposed to happen. This is a whitewash of the worst kind.