Hughes Darren: General Debates 
Hughes Darren: General Debates 
[Volume:610;Page:7926] 
DARREN HUGHES (NZ Labour—Otaki) 
: 
 What an extraordinary speech from somebody who offers herself as a potential Cabinet Minister in New Zealand. That was the woman who stood up in Parliament and said that the Australian treatment of the Aboriginal people over the years was the perfect match for race relations in New Zealand. She said that people had to go to Australia to see how the Aboriginal people are treated— 
Dr Lynda Scott 
: Point of order Mr Speaker— 
Mr SPEAKER 
: No that is not a point of order. 
Dr Lynda Scott 
: Yes it is. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: At the end of the speech the member can raise a point of misrepresentation; she cannot raise a point of order just to disagree with something. 
Dr Lynda Scott 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I seek clarification. If someone is very clearly misrepresenting another member I believe that misrepresentation is a point of order under the Standing Orders. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: Yes it is—at the end of the member’s speech. 
DARREN HUGHES 
: The member has proved my point: she will never sit in Cabinet and she will sit on the front bench of the Opposition for only a short time longer because she gets cleaned up in the health debate every single day by the Hon Annette King. She has not suggested a single health initiative to try to improve the well-being of New Zealanders. She is silent on any alternative for how to run the health system. She comes into the House and just carps whinges and whines about low-income New Zealanders getting more health access. She has nothing to contribute. She started off her speech by criticising Russell Fairbrother. What an absolute joke! 
Today I want to talk about leadership not just of the National Party but across the three parties that make up the Opposition because in my opinion it is a coalition of the falling. It is a coalition of the falling every single time an opinion poll comes out. Mr Prebble has suggested a three-way coalition involving National New Zealand First and ACT. The problem for those three parties is that based on last night’s opinion poll their total support equals half that of the Labour Party. Those are the kinds of parties that offer themselves as an alternative and they are going nowhere. Their problem is their leadership—Bill English Winston Peters and Richard Prebble. 
Mr English is increasingly showing why he is too unstable for leadership of the National Party. Increasingly we are seeing the quick temper and the anger come out from Mr English. We now daily watch him in the House screaming and ranting instead of giving a speech. We are not seeing him offer any ideas; he just yells loses his temper and shows how he is out of touch with what New Zealanders want. We see in the opinion poll that only 5 percent of people rated him as somebody who was performing well in his job; 95 percent do not give him that rating. He is surrounded in his leadership team by his brat-pack mates and people ought to remember that when those four brat-pack MPs arrived the National Party spread itself around this Chamber with 47 percent of the vote. Today now that those members are in charge of the leadership of the National Party it sits on 21 percent of the vote and it is back in a little corner of the House—a corner that is receding as New Zealand First comes up and bites at its heels. 
What is happening with Mr Peters? He now has double the support that Mr English has as preferred Prime Minister and that is what is making Bill English angrier and angrier and making him take more and more extreme positions. I think the poll result that he will be most disappointed in is that relating to the question: “Is the leader in touch with the needs of Maori?” Seventy-five percent of poll respondents said “No”. I think that when Bill English reflects on that he will be very very sad because how did he get the leadership of the National Party? He got it by saying that the National Party had to become a broader church to get more votes. He said it had to reflect the new New Zealand which was browner younger and more different from the National Party of old. Those were the ideals he brought to the leadership of the National Party. But now that he has got the job he is going after the Maori people and attacking them in order to try to get some headlines. That is the part of the poll result that I think he will find most displeasing. 
 Then we come to the leader of the low-polling threshold party the ACT party. That is the party that knows all about getting taxpayer funds to use for what it wants and has the audacity as shown by Heather Roy’s speech to criticise public servants for going on public policy exercises while its members sit in the House without expellingDonna Awatere Huata because they want her cash for running their office. Very recently Mr Prebble was in my electorate. I say “my electorate” because I notice that the National Party debate was led off by Roger Sowry who talks as though he is in touch with New Zealanders despite the fact that he is a three-time loser in that seat and cannot get any votes from people. National Party voters give their party vote to the National Party and vote for the Labour candidate because they know what a hopeless local MP he would be. 
Mr Prebble rolled up to Levin to promote his book  
Liberal Thinking 
. He rolled up to McLeods Paper Plus in Oxford Street only to find that nobody despite advertising had turned up to buy his book. Mr Prebble was a bit put out by that but it gets worse: the bookshop owners knew his book would be so unpopular that they had not ordered any copies at all. There were no copies of his book available to buy in the bookshop. That is how relevant the ACT party has become.