Fitzsimons Jeanette: Urgent Debates — David Parker—Resignation from Executive 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Urgent Debates — David Parker—Resignation from Executive 
[Volume:630;Page:1986] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 On behalf of the Green Party I say that I am disgusted and sickened at the way the business of this House for days weeks and months has been diverted from the serious issues facing this country into mudslinging and character assassination. We have become a Star Chamber and McCarthyism is alive and well. It is the last resort of a desperate Opposition that has no ideas and no policies to attack individuals through character assassination. 
The disappointment of Opposition members was palpable today when David Parker did the honourable thing so quickly that they could no longer use all the questions they had laid down in question time for the purpose for which they had laid them down. They suddenly had to do a lot of research on the electricity situation and various other things because they could no longer use their questions to try to lampoon the Minister who had just resigned. 
Failure to report accurately to the Companies Office is not trivial. It does reflect on the office of Attorney-General and I think it is commendable that David Parker took only hours—less than a day—to reach that conclusion and to tender his resignation as Attorney-General. But I think he has been too hard on himself in assuming that it disqualifies him from being the Minister of Energy the Minister of Transport and the Minister responsible for Climate Change Issues on which he was starting to make a real impression. 
I ask other members in this House to reflect seriously on how many of them have never done anything that they regret. How many people in this House have never done anything in their lives that they would be ashamed to have dragged in front of this House exposed for scrutiny and exaggerated by other members? How many of them have never broken the law in any respect whatsoever? I think that if people were honest about this they would realise that we are pretending to set up parliamentarians in some kind of glass cage as people who must be perfect in every respect so that we can have enormous fun dragging them down when we come across some misdemeanour in their past. That is not what the New Zealand public expects them to be. 
I am not the only person in New Zealand—and the Greens are not the only six people—who is sickened at the way Parliament has gone on and on and on about one Minister after another because the Opposition cannot find anything else to talk about. We had weeks of it with David Benson-Pope. We had weeks of it about the pledge card. But we do not hear much from the Opposition about its overspending. We do not get any acknowledgment from Opposition members that they colluded with and encouraged a religious sect to spend half a million dollars on their behalf distributing outright lies about the Green Party to every letterbox. We do not hear that said very much at all by the members on those benches. 
David Parker is an honourable man. He is one of the most honest and straightforward people I have dealt with in this Parliament. I worked with him closely over the last 3 years on the Local Government and Environment Committee. I found him to be utterly scrupulous even declaring conflicts of interest to the committee when most of us would never have thought there was a conflict of interest at all. I hope that his extreme honesty and scruples today will not prevent his coming back as a Minister at some stage in the future because I think he has a great deal to offer. 
Meanwhile will this Parliament take anywhere near as much interest in the questions facing this country as it is taking in this kind of debate? Will we see the threat of climate change which is already under way—and New Zealand’s so far rather pathetic response to it—debated with as much passion as we have the misdemeanours of individual people in the House? Will we see peak oil and the threat that that poses to our way of life our transport system our production our trade and our economy debated with anything like the seriousness with which these personal matters are debated? If members want to have an easy life in Opposition it is too easy just to focus on slinging the mud rather than doing the real work and getting stuck into the real issues. But New Zealand is the poorer for it. 
People out there hold Parliament largely in contempt. As a member of this House it gives me huge sadness to say that our standing in the community is not high. That is why there is so much support for having 20 fewer of us. Of course whether it would be the right 20 who go would be another question. The public does not seem to have quite worked out that it will not necessarily get rid of the 20 that it thinks are the biggest problem. It is time that Parliament took seriously its lack of standing with the community. The first way to do that would be to stop this mudslinging and personality and character assassination and actually get on with the issues that are important to people. 
The future will not condemn this Government because some Ministers erred in roles that were not part of their ministerial warrant. Future generations will be much more concerned about whether this Government took serious action on the big issues facing our country particularly the issues that David Parker was in charge of—climate change peak oil and transport solutions. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: Before I call the next member I advise the House that the Maori Party has agreed to share its speaking time with the ACT party.