Cosgrove Clayton: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Cosgrove Clayton: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 13 June 2012. Volume:680;Page:2932. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE (Labour) 
: 
 Before I get to the guts of my speech I just want to address the last point that the member Mark Mitchell raised. He talked about what the Government has done for small business. He talked about a bill called the Regulatory Reform Bill in the name of Minister John Banks which does something amazingly innovative—it repeals 31 Acts that do not exist. But apart from that it is now languishing on the bottom of the Order Paper because the Government is so scandal-ridden that it does not want its fingerprints its boot prints or its toe prints anywhere near John Banks. Do you know what the cost of that is to small business? I talked to the film industry. I went and visited them on Friday. It is costing them $50000 a week because there is a clause about classification that when passed will make the industry efficient and save them $50000 a week. But it is costing them because these guys will not pass the bill because they do not want the ghost of “Uncle Fester” anywhere near the public—anywhere near the public eye.  
Now that we have put the sword into that one I will read Government members a few quotes from the Christchurch  
Press 
. This is a headline from the Christchurch  
Press 
: “The Government has made itself look careless and incompetent”. It says: “The Government’s botched handling of education reform raises significant doubts”—oh this is a cracker—“about the competence of senior ministers and the Prime Minister.” This is from the Christchurch  
Press 
—not known to be the reddest publication in the world.  
Hon Ruth Dyson 
: Newspaper of the year. 
Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE 
: It is the newspaper of the year. It says that senior Ministers in this crowd are incompetent. What the education back-down shows us is that there is no blueprint no plan and no strategy. They are poll-driven fruit cakes and they change their minds like Gerry as he goes from brunch goes to lunch and goes to dinner. They change their minds like they change their socks. There is no plan it is ad hoc there is no blueprint and there is no strategy. They change their minds every day based on a poll result.  
I will read them another great headline here from last weekend’s  
Sunday Star-Times 
: “Key’s govt losing charm offensive”. It says this: “The proposed increase in class sizes was a minor matter a stupid idea invented by Treasury and swallowed by sleepy politicians.” I think it is talking about Nicky Wagner actually. “But the Government won’t back down on its core policies.” Then it says this: “The sell-down of state assets after all is nearly as unpopular as the increase in class sizes. But the Government is ramming through the asset sales in a rush and popular protest won’t stop it.”  
It goes on to say this: “There is no good argument for asset sales. They make no difference to the Government’s net debt. It is flogging off assets for ideological reasons not economic ones.” Yet again it is not-thought-through slipshod work and populist stuff—for some of its constituency about 1 percent. It is not thought through at all—the incompetence the lack of a plan. And every day there is another scandal that rolls out. Some of them hide behind their desks. They are like a bunch of what I think the Australians call skinks—you know lizards. I think Paul Keating actually said this. Most of them over there are sort of lizards sitting there frozen—alive but looking dead. They are alive but looking dead all of them. And I say— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: No no—Jonathan Young moves like a tuatara.  
Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE 
: My colleague says that Jonathan Young moves like a tuatara. There is scandal after scandal. It is an inward-looking Government that is obsessed and myopic about its own incompetence. Every day our people in the communities languish. There are 87000 young people on the scrap heap and the Government is proud of it. There are people in Christchurch who have had a glacial pace—a glacial pace—to their recovery from the earthquake disaster and the Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery interferes with one of the best chief executive officers I think we have had Mr Roger Sutton who has now basically been corralled sat on and had a fence put around him. He cannot do his job because Mr Brownlee puts the politics in front of everything including the humanity of our communities.  
The Government is inward-looking. It has “third-term-itis” in the second term. John Banks Nick Smith Richard Worth—the scandals go on—Judith Collins ACC and all the time our communities the people men and women who need help who need assistance who are in desperate times and cannot make ends meet and who look to a Government for leadership for a strategy for a plan for help and for assistance get nothing from this crowd because it is so self-obsessed.  
Well I say this: when you start to get headlines like this when you start to get major newspapers calling the Prime Minister incompetent and saying that the charm offensive is over when you start to get newspapers and media saying that senior Ministers are incompetent then that is when you start on the slippery slope.