Williamson Maurice: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Williamson Maurice: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 28 November 2012. Volume:686;Page:6871. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (Minister for Building and Construction) 
: 
 Yesterday at question time this House witnessed the full Shakespearean theatrics. It started as a comedy it moved through to the area of a farce and it finally ended in a tragedy for the previous speaker David Parker. Let me explain. 
The first part was the comedy where one of our Ministers was answering a question and David Cunliffe had the gall to call out from the back of the House: “He can’t do his numbers.” Based on what had happened to Mr Cunliffe at the Labour Party conference at the weekend there is only one person in this House who should never make the claim to someone else that you cannot do your numbers. 
 But wait there is more and it gets so deliciously more. On the front bench one of the other Davids—and believe me there are lots of them—is this almost savant-like almost sort of phenomenal brain those members have now to be their finance spokesman and I understand that. That is what he should be. He has got this genius tag to him. He is their finance spokesman and you would expect the finance person to be really good at numbers—you would. 
I am not asking him to do Fourier transforms on convoluted series functions or use Laplace transforms to solve differential equations. They are quite hard. I did them at university. But what I would like to know is that a finance spokesman could multiply two numbers together. OK so I want the House to follow me with this because this is what Mr Parker told the House yesterday. He said to my colleague Phil Heatley: “I would hope that the Minister had checked his arithmetic before coming down to this House because by my reckoning”—so it means he had obviously checked it and he had calculated it—“if you were to build one house every hour every day for 10 years it would come to 613000 houses and Labour is only advocating 100000.” 
I was really embarrassed by this because I had told my caucus that morning that 100000 houses in 10 years worked out to be just on one house an hour. I went: “Oh boy am I embarrassed. I’ve done my numbers wrong.” so I grabbed the calculator. No I had not. So I will take the House through it. I will take Mr Parker through this really complicated calculation. 
Michael Woodhouse 
: Go slowly. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: I will take it slowly and I will draw big pictures as we do it. How many hours are there in a day? It is easy. 
Michael Woodhouse 
: 24. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: 24 hours. How many days are there in a year? There are 365. I will not do the leap year one as the leap year is too hard. So now let us multiply those together: 24 times 365 comes to 8760. And do you know what? The next bit is really easy. We now want to do it for 10 years. Most kids even at primary school can multiply by 10. Mr Parker you just add a zero on the end. So the 8760 becomes—oh my God—87600. But he said it was 613000. That is the man who is the head of the brains trust of the Labour Party who had done his calculations who tore my colleague Phil Heatley to shreds for not having checked his mathematics. He was not wrong. He was not slightly wrong. He was not even sort of off course by about 50 percent or 35 percent or 75 percent. He was 700 percent wrong—700 percent. So God knows what a Labour Budget is going to look like if he ever presents it. 
You know he is sort of a Stephen Hawking - like character over there. He sits there looking like: “I really know my numbers when I am just frightened.” and that is why I say it has turned from a farce to a tragedy. Labour is bereft of a leader it is bereft of any sort of direction and now it is bereft of the one anchor it had left the person who could get up and use some numbers and who we thought would at least have some credibility. Now whenever David Parker—this is the tragedy of it; I feel sorry for him—gets up in the future and quotes any numbers the immediate response will be: “Are you sure you checked your arithmetic? Are you sure you have?” because if you can get that wrong—and there are kids in the gallery today who could multiply 24 by 365 and come up with the answer. They are primary schoolkids—primary schoolkids—and he would not even have to force national standards on to them and yet that member got up in this House and questioned the veracity of a member because he had used the numbers I had done that morning. He has wiped himself off the planet for credibility when it comes to numeracy. Leave him—