Moroney Sue: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Moroney Sue: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Sitting date: 29 January 2013. Volume:687;Page:7558. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 Happy New Year to you Mr Deputy Speaker and to the House. Can I start my contribution to this debate first of all by congratulating some of the Waikato-based members of Parliament for the National Party namely Louise Upston and Tim Macindoe on their promotion to senior whip and junior whip respectively. It is a great shame that we did not see any Waikato MPs make it into Cabinet. We do after all have the most productive region in the country yet there are no Waikato MPs—no Waikato MPs—in the National Government’s Cabinet. That is a great shame because I would have liked to see Louise Tim David Bennett and others be considered for a role in Cabinet but it seems that they were not able to make the grade for that. That is disappointing. But I particularly want to congratulate Tim Macindoe. I know he has been working for a long time to get the junior whip’s role and he has got there. It is a role that I had in my first term in this place and it is certainly a big learning curve. It really was a big learning curve for me. I learnt a lot in that role and I know that Tim having got there in his second term will I am sure still have a lot to learn in the role as well. 
But he must be disappointed to have had his first outing in that role be the backdrop for that disappointing contribution from the Prime Minister today. That Prime Minister’s speech was so dead boring that I thought Tim was going to go to sleep at certain stages throughout it. I think I saw his eyelids flutter and his eyes roll back in his head a couple of times. There was nothing in that speech that would give New Zealanders any certainty about the brighter future that that Government has been promising for 5 long years. It was the kind of standard formula that we have become used to from this Prime Minister now after hearing five versions of it. He starts off by blaming Labour for everything—this is his set formula. Then he tells a few jokes—you know he gets a bit of stand-up going—and then he moves on to making excuses for why the Government has not been able to do what it said it would do the year before and he hopes that when he gets to the end of it no one notices that he still has not got a plan. After 5 long years he still has no plan. 
It is a bit like  
Groundhog Day 
 because contributing to this debate a year ago I was saying this is the year the Government has to turn the economy round. It has to get jobs going. This is the year that there are no more excuses for that Government. There are no more excuses. And here I am again 12 months later saying exactly the same thing because the Government failed. The Government failed to do what it had to do in 2012—what the electorate was crying out for from this Government in 2012. The Government has failed and today that speech from the Prime Minister was another example of failure. It was the same old formula: a few stand-up jokes a few excuses blame the Labour Party but no new ideas. 
Listening to some of the other contributions that have happened I noticed when I listened to Jo Goodhew’s speech that she kept promising she would talk about her portfolios. She talked about health quite a lot and she talked about older people but she did not have anything to say about women—and she is the Minister of Women’s Affairs. They are actually—we are—51 percent only of the population and she could not find anything to say about that Government and its performance with regard to women and their families. But there are no surprises there because it is this side of the House it is Labour that understands the pressures on families today in New Zealand and that is demonstrated—absolutely demonstrated—by our commitment to bring about a proposal for affordable housing because we get it. On this side of the House in the Labour Party we know how important affordable secure and decent housing is for families. It is a pretty fundamental thing. If you have not got that right if you have not got decent housing then it is no good having any of the other cycleways or these sorts of frippery sort of plans that the Government comes up with from time to time—these one-off shots. They make no difference to those families. 
Then there is the Government’s position on paid parental leave because the Government just does not get it. The Government plans later on this year to use a little-used tool in this House. In fact it has never been used in this way before. The Government plans to use a financial veto against babies for goodness’ sake! That is what it plans to do. The Government has told the electorate that even though my bill to extend paid parental leave to 26 weeks 6 months the Parental Leave and Employment Protection (Six Months’ Paid Leave) Amendment Bill based on getting good breastfeeding patterns going and all those things that we know are good for future generations—despite the fact that my bill has majority support in this House the Government will stop it in its tracks. I am going to ask the Government this year to play fair play fair on behalf of families because this House will pass with a majority the extension to paid parental leave. I am asking the Government to actually go and talk with families. Find out how important this is for them listen to the submissions to the Government Administration Committee and lift the threat of a financial veto against those families those babies and our future. 
Then there is the Christchurch rebuild that we just heard the previous speaker Nathan Guy speaking about. I got pretty excited when he talked about a Canterbury skills hub because I thought that finally finally the Government had got it that we need skills development in this country and that there would be training on offer for all of those young people who are crying out for a direction in our country. But they are not going to get it from that Government because it turns out that the Canterbury Skills and Employment Hub is about working out how many migrant workers we need to rebuild Canterbury. It is not about Kiwi workers at all. So that is extremely disappointing because that Government had plenty of time. It has had 2 years to work it out from the time those earthquakes happened. It has had 2 years to get apprentices going to get apprenticeships under its belt so that they could be rebuilding Christchurch. Those young people are without hope because of that Government’s lack of action on issues like the Christchurch rebuild. Well the Government has no excuse for that. It knew that was coming up. It knew the rebuild was going to be important to this country. The Government knew that there were many young New Zealanders looking for the opportunity to be trained and it has failed to do it. 
But I think the biggest joke the biggest stand-up part of the comedy routine from the Prime Minister this afternoon has to be when he talked about education. Everyone knows that the National Government does not understand just how important a quality education is to families in New Zealand. For many families that is the thing they rely on for the next generation. I know of families that will go without many of the necessities of life to ensure that their children get a decent education. That is how strongly many low-income families in particular feel about education and so they should. But what have they had from that Government? They have had attack after attack after attack on our quality education system. They have had a Minister of Education smooth communicator that she is telling them that the pathway to a quality education is to increase the number of children in every classroom so that every teacher had more children to deal with and more children to be imparting that quality education to. Well it does not take a high degree of education to know that that was just rampant nonsense. But such a smooth communicator is Hekia Parata that she managed to convince the entire National Cabinet that this was a great idea. It was not just her. The entire National Cabinet agreed that increasing class sizes was a great way forward for our education system and the shame of that is that they still believe it. They could not get away with it but they still believe it and they will find a way to revisit that when they can. 
Of course it all started with the Government diminishing early childhood education quality by cutting $400 million out of early childhood education in Budget 2010. The Government cut that money out to stop centres from employing 100 percent qualified staff. That was the beginning of the slippery slope of reducing the quality and the standard of our world-class education system. Well you will not have that from this side of the House. Christchurch schools Novopay charter schools national standards—the list goes on and on. 
If that Prime Minister firmly believes that the Government is developing this brighter future then I think he needs to get out and talk with families talk with real people about what their aims and aspirations are. Talk with the person I talked to a couple of days ago—actually it was the editor of the  
Waikato Times 
—who told me that he once believed that national standards was a great idea until he saw his children’s first report and he could not understand a word of it. So that Government’s days are numbered and it starts this year.