O'Connor Damien: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Connor Damien: General Debate[Sitting date: 12 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5715. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAMIEN O’CONNOR (Labour—West Coast - Tasman): Rock star to rock-bottom led by the hundred-billion-dollar man—$100 billion. One thing I will say about Muldoon is that he borrowed only $19 billion. That is a pretty poor effort when you have John Key who has borrowed $100 billion in 7 years. He is the trader the “Smiling Assassin” the PM who likes Hawaii. He likes hair and he loves himself. He said that he wanted Fonterra shares to be traded. He said that New Zealand should be the financial hub of the Asia-Pacific region—until he found out it was going to cost a whole lot of money and Treasury advised him not to go down that path.He is a guy who does not have a vision. He has not developed a plan. I do not agree with my colleagues who say “Where’s plan B?” because there has never been plan A. If I can quote Mike Hosking—and I have to say he is one of the greatest cheerleaders of the Prime Minister I have ever heard. He is usually full of it but what he said yesterday is: “… what worries me about this country is our view is so short of term.” Well he is right and his mate John Key has been in charge of this country for 7 years without any plan being developed for our future. Bill English’s constituents must be horrified. What will the Diptonites think down there of their conservative Bill coming to Wellington and raking up $100 billion worth of debt? I think they will think he has gone to Wellington and so has his sense of reality. I know that they would certainly not be voting him back in.Where does that lack of a plan leave our economy? We have the dairy industry facing some huge challenges. It was the star of our rocky economy but now not so. Because there has been no vision no strategy no plan for where we may go and no diversification that failing to plan has meant that we have planned to fail. Fonterra itself must take some responsibility. It set up a global trading platform that has simply driven the price down. It is the only New Zealand producer of dairy products on that platform and there is only one other company selling. It is not an internationally recognised global trading platform and so it is only giving indicative prices for dairy products.Can I say that John Key has been determined to see the dairy industry on the stock market. He provided that through Trading Among Farmers and now we have a company that is split between the loyalties to its shareholders or unitholders and those to its supplying farmers. That dilemma has distracted the directors. Can I say that on a day that the ASB has announced a record profit of $859 million one of its directors sits on the board of Fonterra. I think when 500 staff at Fonterra are going to come under scrutiny so too should the directors. There are three directors of Fonterra who sit on the major trading banks of this country that have effectively lent $34 billion to dairy farmers. We are told by cheerleaders for the Government not to call this a crisis. I say to you: put yourself in the gumboots of the farmer who has been encouraged to borrow money to grow his business to grow the exports—double the exports this Government has said—and now faces not only declining equity and a lack of viability but in fact a very very bleak future.It is not looking too good. Our rock star economy has got to rock-bottom. Yes there are some stars—the beef industry temporarily the wine industry and the horticulture industry—but our No. 1 industry dairy is on its knees at the moment and it is going to be a big big effort to get it out. We have seen no direction no support and no help from this National Government. What we say is that it will once again take a Labour Government to get the dairy industry out of the doldrums. It started in the 1930s and happened again in the 1950s in the 1970s and when we formed Fonterra and we made the hard call to take off subsidies. We are always prepared to make the hard decisions show the leadership across the agribusiness sector and make sure that this economy goes forward. At the moment we face a very bleak future because the National Government has failed to plan and inevitably will plan to fail. The one person responsible is the trader over that side of the House John Key who came into this House wanting to sell off everything—