Jones Shane: General Debate 
Jones Shane: General Debate 
[Volume:640;Page:10701] 
SHANE JONES (Labour) 
: 
Tena koe tena tatou katoa i tenei wiki i whakaritea hei whakanuinga ma tatou i to tatou reo Maori; kia riro ko te reo Maori hei reo korerotanga i roto i nga kokorutanga katoa. Greetings fellow parliamentarians and Mr Assistant Speaker at this time Maori Language Week where we promote the language as a vehicle for communication and as a strong contributor to our growing identity as a nation. I offer those words because they are in contrast to the very weak and confused contribution offered by someone who from time to time makes a strong thespian contribution to the House Mr Groser. He went further than Dr Mapp who despite his many years of holding forth and blighting the minds of university students at Auckland University has precious few thespian virtues about him. 
However I stand to support an earlier speaker Mr Swain and I remind everyone that the Leader of the Opposition refuses to give a straight answer on the big issues confronting us as a nation. At all times he has refused to straighten his delivery with the students of the nation. Our Prime Minister when we fought the election showed not a sliver of doubt in leaving the families of students at tertiary institutions in the position of understanding that the burden of tertiary education would be inordinately easy under our side. But that man has refused to come clean and admit that National’s agenda is to reduce the props that the State offers in order to enlarge the prospects of our university students. He is a person who has cultivated an image up and down the country—fortunately it is not stretching very far outside commercial circles—of having been raised in modest circumstances of having risen to the upper levels of commercial citadels and of having been an expert on the currency and on what is likely to become of the currency as people move in and out of trading. 
We have not heard one fresh one single one constructive contribution from Mr Key in that regard and that saddens me. At least we know from Dr Cullen from the Prime Minister and from the entire Government front bench that there is no end of fresh exciting ideas to uplift. As we say in Maori te iti me te rahi [ 
the small and the large 
]—people at all levels in society. But John Key offers nothing. That will count against Mr Key. Yes I have no doubt in my mind that he could fund the entire election campaign from his resources. I have no doubt in my mind that he has been prevailed upon and that the plan has probably been promoted with that strength of his in mind but he will need more than deep pockets. He will need more than a reputation from distant areas in order to carry him forward because at the moment we have a fantastic economy. 
We have an economy where investment in capital infrastructure has grown. We have a situation where great amounts of imported capital equipment is flowing into the country. Yes the dollar is at a troublesome height but we do not get a strong dollar unless we have buoyancy and resilience in the economy. This morning the leader of all the exporters Mr Walters said on television that he did not want to see indiscriminate intervention. That is fine and it shows that he believes that we have a strong future in relation to our economy. 
There is one area where I think Mr Key has been of assistance to us. He has gone out of his way to befuddle my whanaunga over there in the Maori Party. Of course those members are seeking a new partnership no longer with the Crown but with the judiciary. The partnership they seek with the judiciary is to allow our people to go year after year month after month bleak episode after bleak episode back to the courts to rerun tired irrelevant arguments about the seabed and foreshore. They will put their bill forward which I will have a great deal to say about this afternoon—although it is rather strange that we should contribute such fine thoughts to modest and totally useless proposed legislation that will soon find its way to the scrap heap of parliamentary history. Mr Key has sought to mislead those members they have misled our iwi and our iwi will show them where Tuku Morgan Tau Henare Rana Waitai Tuariki Delamere and Tu Wylie—despite the best efforts of his association with Ngai Tahu—have ended up. I say that Maori Party members should not mislead Te Ao Maori. They should not tell Te Ao Maori that they seek to be independent but quietly want to move us further back into a grievance mentality with the active encouragement of Mr Key. Kia ora tatou.