English Bill: General Debate 
English Bill: General Debate 
[Volume:631;Page:3146] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 The Labour Minister can say what he likes about those issues but he needs to consider that this Budget will be overshadowed by the fracas around the Telecom leak and now David Cunliffe the Minister of Communications being subject to a Securities Commission investigation. In fact it prompted a thought—[ 
Interruption 
]—the Cunliffe Budget that is right; his first his best and I suspect his last. In a way though Dr Cullen deserves it I think. 
It did make me think about the inquiries that this Government has had to deal with this year. I will just run through a quick list for the benefit of Parliament and the public who are listening. This year there has been a police inquiry into David Benson-Pope; a Companies Act inquiry into David Parker; a police investigation into the Labour Party’s election expenses which concluded that Heather Simpson would be prosecuted if she went before a court; a State Services Commission inquiry into the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet which we have debated today; and on Friday the Securities Commission initiated an inquiry into Government processes for protecting confidential commercial information and in the next day or two it will almost certainly start to investigate David Cunliffe’s statements that as an insider affected the Telecom share price the other day. That is six inquiries by statutory agencies into potentially serious offences committed by people who are in or working for the current Labour Government. 
Simon Power 
: It’s one every 3 weeks. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: I thought it was one a month but the member is right; it is one every 3 weeks. It is that kind of shadiness and growing untrustworthiness that will cloud the public’s view of the Budget. All of those things are elements and symptoms of their mistrust of Dr Cullen. The key public reaction to this Budget will be that they do not trust Dr Cullen’s statements that New Zealand cannot afford tax cuts. When he says it now they just do not believe him. What compounds that lack of belief is the growing understanding among the public that Labour operates in the shade says things that it knows are not true but says them anyway and is now getting caught regularly doing it by the statutory agencies of law and order. It is all part of a bigger picture. And Dr Cullen will be telling New Zealanders something that is not correct. He can afford tax cuts and by the time he gets up to give his speech tomorrow he will wish that he had been giving them because he does not have much else to say. 
The other problem he has is that the public now do not trust the Labour Government with spending public money. The public like Working for Families but almost everything else the Government initiates now they regard as wasting public money. So when Dr Cullen gets up tomorrow and announces 23 different initiatives that spread $3.2 million each over 4 years they will think it is a waste of time—just like the reception of Steve Maharey’s announcement about giving schools $9 million over 4 years to fix bullying. That will be enough to employ the bureaucrat who will organise the workshops and the PowerPoint presentation and write the strategy. That is the end of it; it is all gone and the public know that. 
What will underlie this Budget tomorrow is not so much its boredom although it will be boring not so much that it will do nothing for growth although it will not do anything for growth nor that it means we will fall further behind Australia because it certainly means we will but that the public just will not trust anything Dr Cullen says. That is why my colleague is right—Dr Cullen is now a dead man walking. The one person in the Labour caucus who knows that for sure is Helen Clark. That is why she has already said she does not know whether he will be there again. Of course the shame is that tomorrow Dr Cullen may not get to give a valedictory. He may get to pretend that it is a vigorous new visionary Budget transforming the economy and I think he will try that but it will probably be his last Budget. That would not be a bad thing for New Zealand.