Brownlee Gerry: Financial Review Debate — Procedure In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Brownlee Gerry: Financial Review Debate — Procedure In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:616;Page:11852] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (Deputy Leader—National) 
: 
 I want to talk about the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet an office that has some $15 million a year available to it a substantial amount of which is for the provision of free and frank advice of an impartial nature to the Prime Minister. That raises a number of questions about the advice that the Prime Minister has received in recent days particularly about the seabed and foreshore issue and the credibility of the department itself has also taken a very severe knock during the year because of the way in which the head of that department Mr Prebble chose deliberately to remove from the public arena official information relating to the “corngate” affair. 
I would like the Prime Minister to take a call to tell us the nature of the discussion with Mr Prebble once it was clear that this department had been caught. Further I think it is important that the Prime Minister tell us whether she knew at the time of his withholding of that official information that it was in existence. These are two simple questions that have not been dealt with over the past 12 months. There have been so many things on the radar screen that little incidents like this tend to drop off and be forgotten and this is the appropriate time to have those issues discussed. 
If we cannot get those sorts of answers then all we can conclude is that the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet is a highly politicised body that might be better known as the “Department of Propaganda” or the “Department of Political Management”. 
I want to turn for a moment to the advice that the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet may or may not have been giving the Prime Minister on the seabed and foreshore issue. It seems the Government has had a range of positions. The initial advice coming after the Court of Appeal decision was: “Don’t panic. We’re about to legislate for Crown ownership of the seabed and foreshore.” We then had a period where clearly that was unacceptable to the Labour members of the caucus known as the “Maori caucus” and some other form of advice had to be given to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. 
We would like to know whether the next lot of advice was part of a transition of advice part of a stream of advice or was it separate because in that advice Dr Cullen seems to have been the person sent out on the attack. He made a speech to the Chapman Tripp business dinner earlier this year where he picked up on some of the comments made by Dr Don Brash. He made the very strong statement that the Treaty of Waitangi made it untenable for the Crown to assert Crown ownership. He went on to suggest that his Government in wanting to recognise customary rights would come up with some form of dual title. He felt that much of the alarm that was being expressed by New Zealanders was of little point because the Government had this so well strapped down there would be no real ongoing problem. 
We now know that the advice to Dr Cullen was wrong—advice presumably via the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet because the advice is available on strategic political matters to all Ministers in the Government. The advice was completely “off” compared with the public’s view of the issue. That raises a question about how that department gets its information and how it assesses what a public view is at any given time. 
It would seem to me that we have now had a third shift in the Government’s thinking where we are talking about dual management of seabed and foreshore being in Crown title except we are told by Margaret Wilson that it is not title as we might ordinarily understand it; it is something new and quite different or as my colleague Dr Mapp would advise us it is perhaps best deciphered as life but not life as we know it.