Peters Winston: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Peters Winston: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 13 June 2012. Volume:680;Page:2925. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First) 
: 
 I move  
That the House take note of miscellaneous business 
. In recent weeks there has been a cacophony of calls a literal caterwauling of echoes regarding a campaign being launched against the senior citizens of this country. They are being targeted because politicians pressure groups and the media have decided they are getting too much money and they are getting it too early. I want to remind members what these people are being paid at 65 years. It is $348 a week for singles who are living alone; it is $536 a week for a married couple. Is there anyone in the House living on that? Are any of these people over there on the Government side living on that? No.  
When there are problems society always looks for scapegoats—let us find someone to blame. Let us for example pick on the elderly. In Nazi Germany they had to find scapegoats. They did not blame their own militant leadership between 1914 and 1918. They just blamed the Jews. We cannot blame the elderly for problems facing New Zealand and I am going to tell members why. These problems were caused by politicians greedy banks and the corrupt leadership of finance companies in the last few years. Since 1984—this is what has happened to New Zealand—two Governments have come into power one in New Zealand and one in Australia. Australia has by making incremental change and reform grown 37 percent larger in terms of GDP in real terms than New Zealand which went down the road of economic experimentation.  
The blame lies fairly in the experience of this House not with the elderly but with those people who thought and still think that this experiment is going to work. It is not going to work. What is the growth rate of Australia which Mr Key has been talking about all this time saying that we are outperforming Australia? Well the growth rate came in for the end of March at well over 4 percent. What is ours? It is 1.1 percent. This genius from Merrill Lynch has been telling this House that for month after month and it is all absurdly false. What is the average of the growth rate under his administration? Well it is a lousy 0.8 percent per year and that is why they are looking round here in this House now and outside for scapegoats and they have found the elderly.  
Who is leading this charge? Well it is the Financial Services Council. Who are they? Well their chairperson is Jenny Shipley. The person who could not understand the BNZ disaster the wine box or the Asian financial crisis is now heading the financial services sector of this country. She was the very person who back in 1997 opposed New Zealand First’s offer for a referendum in this country for people to save from tax cuts 8 percent eventually to go straight into their personal account. We would have had tens of billions now had we done that—and Jenny Shipley went out and opposed it. But now she is leading the financial services and she is saying: “We’re going to have to have a savings plan.” What damn hypocrisy! What a sham that she of all people should be doing this saying: “Well we’ve got to do something about our savings because we can’t afford superannuation 80 years from now.”  
I think there are only 10000 New Zealanders who are 20 years old right now and who have got any chance of living to 100 in 80 years’ time. She is very concerned about that because she says that half of them if they are born now will be 100 years old 100 years from now! No analysis no facts just public relations spin out there and the report has not even been released to anybody yet. No no—you see they are saving the report for some future time. In the meantime they are just scaremongering.  
We know how this problem started. You get certain sections of the public who believe—and the media believe them—that the elderly should pay. We are referring to someone’s grandparents. It is an outrageous situation and New Zealand First will start a revolution before we will let the pension get cut again. We do not intend to run a miserable failed economy. Oh no! We are the ones who believe in the currency being controlled for farmers and exporters. They do not. They believe in downtown Queen Street paper shufflers speculators and foreigners—all sorts of people. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Wall Street not Queen Street. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: Yes Wall Street. Nobody in New Zealand is of any interest to them. They look after all the people who have pumped money into their financial coffers. We know what Bill English did the last time he was the Minister of Finance. What did he do? He cut the pension from 65 percent to a lousy 60 percent.  
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: I call the Hon Amy—