Copeland Gordon: Privilege — Consideration of Report of Privileges Committee Members’ Pecuniary Interests—Gifts and Donations 
Copeland Gordon: Privilege — Consideration of Report of Privileges Committee Members’ Pecuniary Interests—Gifts and Donations 
[Volume:650;Page:18895] 
GORDON COPELAND (Independent) 
: 
 When I submitted my letter to the Speaker of the House on 21 July raising the possibility of a breach of privilege around the gift of $100000 by Mr Owen Glenn to Mr Peters’ lawyer Brian Henry—and I would say to Mr Brian Henry as the agent for the Rt Hon Winston Peters—I really had no idea that it would lead to such an extensive inquiry by the Privileges Committee with all of the twists and turns that the inquiry has taken from then until now. 
I would like to begin by congratulating the Privileges Committee. I took the opportunity to sit in whilst most of the evidence was presented to the committee and I was also there for some of the discussions that occurred between committee members. I congratulate the chair of that committee Simon Power. He obviously went to great lengths to ensure that the evidence was heard in an objective fashion and I would say he bent over backwards to ensure that the principle of natural justice was extended to the Rt Hon Winston Peters. We really need to acknowledge that and I am very very saddened as others are that the Prime Minister has seen fit to actually criticise the entire select committee process in those circumstances because the criticism does not stand up to analysis—I was present in the room as an observer and she was not. 
Peter Dunne mentioned that the heart of this matter goes to various conversations on 14 December 2005 and I agree with that. A phone call was made from Owen Glenn to Winston Peters at 1.26 p.m. on that day and it lasted for about 6 minutes. We do not quite know what was discussed but we know that when the phone call finished at 1.32 p.m. within less than 40 seconds the Rt Hon Winston Peters picked up the phone and rang Brian Henry. Again we do not know quite what occurred in that conversation because neither Mr Peters nor Mr Henry as I will mention in a moment recalls the conversation. But we know that the conversation went for 6 minutes and 10 seconds in that particular case and that within 40 seconds of that telephone call finishing Mr Henry sent an email to Mr Glenn saying that further to Mr Glenn’s discussions with his client at 1.30 p.m. here were the details of his bank account. 
I agree with Rodney Hide that this House and our country owe a debt of gratitude to Mr Glenn. He came here well prepared. He brought with him concrete evidence about those phone calls; he brought with him a copy of the email. If Mr Glenn had not been here then I believe we would have had a very different outcome to this whole inquiry. So we are indebted to Mr Glenn for doing the decent thing and deciding to come here and lay his evidence before the committee. I believe that it was truthful evidence. 
After Mr Glenn submitted details of his call to Mr Peters of 14 December 2005 Mr Peters said he had no recollection of immediately after that call making a call to Mr Henry. However he did concede that he might have done so since there was no other way of accounting for the fact that Mr Henry had sent that email to Mr Glenn. Mr Henry in his subsequent evidence also said he had no recollection of having sent that email to Mr Glenn but then conceded that he must have done so because it had come from his personal computer. The credibility of both Mr Peters and Mr Henry is at stake here. The Privileges Committee had to make a judgment on the facts placed before it and in my view and in my judgment the majority got it right. 
I ask members to ask themselves this question: how likely is it that an experienced Minister of the Crown in the case of Mr Peters and an experienced barrister in the case of Mr Henry would forget about a communication firstly between themselves a 6-minute-long conversation that obviously prompted Mr Henry to send an email to Mr Glenn giving his bank account numbers—what for; to receive a donation—and secondly between Mr Henry and Mr Glenn when the subject matter was a gift of $100000? How many people in this House and how many people in New Zealand with reasonable education and with a reasonable memory would forget about the circumstances in which a gift of $100000 was given? I say it is most unlikely that any reasonable person would simply forget about all the details and have no recollection of the conversation. This issue all came to light only because Mr Glenn put that evidence before the committee. I think it is unlikely in the extreme that someone would forget such details and therefore I entirely concur with the majority opinion that the Rt Hon Winston Peters be censured for knowingly providing false or misleading information in a return of pecuniary interests. 
I now go on to the minority report expounded on today by Dr Cullen who argued that the Rt Hon Winston Peters should not have been censured in these circumstances. I suggest to members that the integrity of the whole pecuniary interests scheme itself would be seriously undermined if we were to refrain from censuring a member of Parliament in these particular circumstances and based on this particular evidence. Members need to ask themselves where Dr Cullen got to at the end of his very lucid analysis of the two different scenarios. He basically concluded that it was not necessary to censure the member. Let us suppose that we were not right now in the light of all of this evidence censuring the Rt Hon Winston Peters. I believe that that would be a most unsatisfactory precedent in terms of upholding the Standing Orders of this Parliament in relation to pecuniary interests. Really in those circumstances we would have set a new low benchmark. 
I want to elaborate on that Madam Speaker. In my original letter to you on 21 July I said surely the standard was that a member must know or reasonably ascertain whether a gift has been received. Would it be right to set that aside by simply having a member say to a third party—in this case his lawyer—“Oh by the way if you get any gifts for me just don’t tell me about them.”? That is what Brian Henry said at the original press conference. He said Winston Peters had told him not to tell him about those gifts so he did not tell him and therefore Winston Peters did not know about them. Now surely that in the absence of a censure would just open up a whole new can of worms. We would degrade the status of the pecuniary interests Standing Orders of this Parliament and that would be a very very unsatisfactory outcome. I have no doubt at all that the select committee has got this decision right. It has made the right decision; it has made the right judgment based on the evidence and therefore I will support the censure motion. 
I just add in conclusion that when I wrote my letter to you Madam Speaker raising this whole matter I was not out to get Winston Peters. I was out to get to the truth so that the integrity of the pecuniary interests provisions of the Standing Orders would be upheld. Under our Standing Orders I am obliged to bring a potential breach of privilege to your attention at the first possible opportunity. As soon as I heard that Winston Peters had received a gift of $100000 from Owen Glenn I had to ask myself whether it had been declared in the register of pecuniary interests. I therefore checked those returns for 2006 2007 and 2008 and discovered that no such gift had been declared. 
I want to say something also in relation to a point raised by Rodney Hide. He said it would also be necessary for Winston Peters to include in the register of pecuniary interests—and he now has to do a revised declaration for those 3 years in terms of the motion before this Parliament—the gift of $40000 received from the Spencer Trust. That may be the case but I also point out that in any event every member of Parliament is obliged also to list in the register of pecuniary interests any beneficial interest in a trust. Winston Peters certainly has a beneficial interest in the Spencer Trust in these circumstances. He also had a beneficial interest in Brian Henry’s trust account when it was receiving gifts that were intended to benefit him. So either way it seems to me that we now need to ask the Rt Hon Winston Peters to come clean about all of those things concerning pecuniary interests including his involvement in any trust of that kind. That is what the Standing Orders provide for and that is what we should insist on. That is what I expect will happen.