Borrows Chester: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Borrows Chester: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:637;Page:7429] 
CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui) 
: 
 On 30 January John Key gave a speech that set a course in New Zealand politics and that continues to do so. John Key ripped the lid off a whole agenda that Labour did not want out of the jar. The beauty of that speech was that Helen Clark and her tribe cannot stop talking about it. John Key set the agenda for the Prime Minister’s speech this week and we have 14 hours to debate the arguments that John Key wanted debated. Labour and the media initially said that the speech was short on substance and short on policy yet now they have to concede that the speech was long on relevance and that it struck a chord with constituents commentators professionals lay people and volunteers who know that people are struggling. The Prime Minister may not care to know that people in this country find it hard to make ends meet because although there are more people in work they still earn peanuts compared with the costs they are forced to meet. It was John Key who led the debate about people doing it tough and it is the Government that is responding to that speech; the boot is firmly on the other foot. Labour members did not want to rip the scab off that sore because they know that keeping people poor hopeless and downtrodden will always leave them a constituency. There is an old saying: “Two men looked out from prison bars one saw mud and one saw stars.” Well Labour wants its people to see only mud. 
Take the elderly for example. On 4 September 365 old folk in Wanganui had their home help subsidy removed. Those oldies got an hour or so a week of vacuuming and washing done that eased their lives a bit. But that got the chop. The home care was done by neat people who had a relationship with the elderly—they called them by their first name and they did it all for 10 bucks an hour. Ten bucks an hour was too much for that miserable lot sitting over on the other side of the Chamber. Well what happened? The oldies had to do their own vacuuming and window washing hang out their own clothes on the line and go to the shops for their groceries and they started falling over breaking bones having heart attacks and being hospitalised. Labour tells them to stay down and stop complaining. 
Labour is slapping people down in education too. It promised 20 free hours of early childhood education but it cannot deliver. Now it hides behind the kindies and the crèches and says: “Well it’s not our fault; those mean childcare workers want too much for childcare.” Labour says it is those workers who will not let us have it. Labour’s price for childcare in Wanganui is 98c an hour; now there are no takers and Labour blames the providers. 
Waverley High School has been in a Labour electorate with a Labour MP for 9 years and under a Labour Government for 7 years. Things have been going downhill for Waverley High School—for nearly 10 years the Ministry of Education says. But it finally did something for the school last year. There are 11 teachers at that school who all get two management units each which means that they teach for 3 and a half days a week—and there are only 65 kids. The ratio of teachers to pupils is one teacher to eight pupils and rocket science should be done even with average students and average teachers but the school is failing all round. The Education Review Office says that 50 percent of the kids can be truant on any one day but there are no records of any child ever being reported to truancy services at all. The New Zealand Qualifications Authority says that there is evidence of teachers and children cheating on National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) exams and assessments and now the school is not allowed to administer any NCEA assessments at all. Labour has failed the community of Waverley. Two-thirds of schoolkids at Waverley Primary School go to intermediate and high school by bus because anyone who can afford to send their kids to any school other than Waverley High School does so. The rest go to school half the time. There is another slap. 
Labour is slapping down people in terms of law and order. Labour knows that it can easily profile the mother of a prison inmate. She was young and probably a teenager when she had her first child. She left school with no qualifications. She is low waged or on a benefit. She smokes tobacco and is probably addicted to alcohol or some other substance. The father of her baby if she knows him is from the same demographic as she is. Once people have been in jail their children have seven times the chance of following them to jail in years to come. Labour knows that if those people vote at all they vote Labour so they are taken for granted. There are 7500 inmates in our prisons today. Eighty-three percent of them have drug and alcohol problems. How many of them got on a drug or alcohol course in jail last year? One hundred and seventy-four out of 7500. Labour does not care. 
Prisoners should come out of jail better than when they went in but Labour does not want that either. Eighty percent of prisoners do no study or work; they do nothing while they are in jail. In Kaitoke prison there was a shoe factory that employed about a hundred inmates a year. Most had never worked. Anecdotally the prison officers tell me that none who worked in that shoe factory ever came back to prison. That in itself saved millions of dollars. But it was shut down in 2003 because it did not make a profit. There is another slap. 
Liam Ashley was a boy who had been looked after in a special school for kids with problems. Then he reached the ripe old age of 16 and there was nothing for him—no dough in the education system for him. There was nothing to protect this vulnerable young man. He was put on a work programme where he rubbed shoulders with other little Fagins who exploited and manipulated him and he got into trouble with the law. He ended up in a prison van where he should not have been. He was handcuffed to a violent murderer locked away and killed—and nobody said sorry. Nobody in the Government has put up a hand and said: “This is my fault I was responsible.” In fact the only person who has done that has pleaded guilty and awaits sentencing. 
Then we have Graeme Burton a man who was in jail for murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. He escaped and was recaptured. He showed no sign of remorse or concern and came up for parole. He was told that he would not get it but a year or so later when he came up for parole he jumped through the hoops and was given parole on strict conditions. He broke the conditions and the Department of Corrections and the police knew about it. He was going nuts and beating the hell out of people robbing people acquiring guns and taking drugs. What he was not doing was reporting in. He was not keeping appointments and behaving like a person serving a life sentence. That is what escapes the commentators on this issue. Graeme Burton robbed beat up people armed himself and murdered—and thankfully was eventually shot—while he was serving a life sentence. Who is in charge of people doing life sentences? The Minister of Justice is. He has just finished speaking; he did not mention the case as far as I can recall. The Minister of Justice the Minister of Corrections and the chief executive officer of the Department of Corrections are in charge. Burton has pleaded guilty but no one in charge has said sorry. 
Labour has slapped down people on welfare. Labour’s policies are hell-bent on achieving statistical benchmarks whereby people are pushed into jobs that are not suited to their skills hopes or future. Kids are leaving school without hope ambition and desire—not to mention without the NCEA. Sally is a beneficiary in my electorate. She was encouraged to think of where she would like to work if there were no barriers. She could not see past working at her local cinema. When she was further encouraged to think beyond just getting enough cash to see her through the day she began to visualise a life where she was working with children perhaps living in a flat in Wellington perhaps studying perhaps getting rid of her current dead loss relationship and actually achieving some of those goals lost long ago. She was given work experience at a local school and she did well. After a month or so when the school was contacted it said that she was great that it loved her that the kids loved her and that it did not know what it did without her. She looked into education papers and teacher training and suddenly saw a life that was not reliant on a hand-to-mouth benefit or the State. Sadly this Government—with its lack of vision and flexibility and which is meant to put its money where it is needed—gave her a job. This constituent of mine after almost finding a way out of the cycle is once again back on a benefit and working part time at the Warehouse where she had to go or lose the benefit. Her teacher training papers sit on the dressing table at home where suddenly it all seems too expensive too impossible and too far away. There is no more job at the school no more teacher training college and no hope. There is another slap. 
Tommy Trinder was an old music-hall comedian. If I do my best Peter Brown impression maybe I can do an impression of Tommy. He said: “What’s the Labour Government ever done for the working man? Promised him everything given him nothing and before he gets it they take it away from him.” Tommy Trinder said it as a joke but it is the reality for our people doing it hard in our country. It is no joke.