English Bill: General Debate 
English Bill: General Debate 
[Volume:631;Page:2922] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 One of the puzzles of New Zealand politics over the last 10 years has been why Winston Peters does not want to be taken seriously. This is a man who most people would agree has some media presence and political capacity—there is no doubt about that. Some of us who have known him for quite a long time have always thought he would one day take the opportunity to be a serious politician. After the last election it looked like he might have decided to do so. He raised a serious issue—the relationship between New Zealand and the US—and he looked as if he might have meant what he said which is a bit hard to take sometimes from a man whose ferry bottom has scraped Cook Strait more times than I can remember. But it looked like he would have a go at it. 
The National Party was interested in going along with him. Don Brash played his part in a way that I had not seen an Opposition leader play it before. He went off to Washington with a senior Minister from the Government—I cannot recall that happening before—to talk about an issue that has been politically sensitive in New Zealand and he did so with good will with good intent and there is absolutely no doubt about it with the New Zealand interest at heart. Winston Peters was not there because he has not been to the US but I presume he was as Minister of Foreign Affairs going along with it. But he cannot help himself. On the very day when the Americans signalled some shift in that relationship Winston Peters let his personal animosity towards Don Brash cut right across the national interest. 
Do members not think that officials in the US embassy and our own civil servants in foreign affairs would have been sitting there asking themselves how they could take Winston Peters seriously? Phil Goff asked that question yesterday if quietly. He wants to know how to handle the situation when he goes back to America and when they say that his man said he wanted a better relationship but then made out like being an American was some kind of disease—some kind of terrorism—and it is some kind of interference if an Opposition politician talks to one of them. 
Let us see what sort of American behaviour Winston Peters is endorsing. His campaign manager who my colleague Gerry Brownlee has talked about used to be a Republican Party fund-raiser. Is that how Winston Peters knew on  
Morning Report 
—or said he knew—that the Republican Party was worried about Americans in New Zealand politics? I believe he had been talking to John Foote his campaign manager when he said that. What a ridiculous and stupid thing for that man to say when he was representing our country. 
Another bit of conspiracy theory if he wants one is that Helen Clark is in the process of dropping Plunket from PlunketLine—it will be a line with no Plunket—which is an iconic New Zealand community organisation. Who is getting the contract? A large American corporation with a US$70 billion turnover that is currently enmeshed in fraud proceedings in the US. So I ask Winston where his conspiracy is. I want to know whether Glenn Owen or Owen Glenn—whatever his name is—who donated $300000 to the Labour Party is a shareholder in the McKesson corporation. Why is this Government with Winston Peters’ support trying so hard to shaft Plunket—to the extent that the Prime Minister is now not invited to its 100th anniversary—and hand the contract to a multibillion dollar American corporation in which a Labour Party donor might be a shareholder? Members opposite should answer that question. 
One can see how we can go into all sorts of theories about Americans—including about Winston’s campaign manager. As my colleague Maurice Williamson said it is a bad case of foot in mouth.