Brownlee Gerry: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Brownlee Gerry: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:606;Page:3304] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (NZ National—Ilam) 
: 
 That was an interesting speech from the Minister of Maori Affairs. I would like to ask the Minister one question: if the words “He iwi tahi tatou.” mean “We are now one people.” how on earth can one people also be partners? The concept of partnership in the Treaty of Waitangi is a big nonentity—it simply does not exist. The problem in New Zealand is that we have strayed away from the reality that on 6 February 1840 two peoples became one. Any concept that somehow there are two nations operating inside this country must stop. I ask members to consider that if the treaty conferred rights on all of us as New Zealanders why do those rights particularly have to mean something extra for Maori in many pieces of legislation? Why should the Resource Management Act be required to treat Maori property or Maori spiritual values any differently to mine? The Minister sits there dumbfounded with no answer to that because he is quite happy that the concept is growing in this country that Maori will be treated in a feather-bed fashion as some sort of exalted iconic people when in fact they are part of us and we are part of them. New Zealand is one nation and one people.  
There is only one party in this Parliament that has a chance to do anything about that problem which is growing in the hearts of middle New Zealand. I want to compliment Bill English for having the guts to stand on marae around this country and make it very clear that the nonsense that has been perpetrated by so many Maori for so long is going to stop. He will lead a Government that will demand one standard of citizenship and one nation. [ 
Interruption 
] I suggest we get someone in to settle the Minister down so that we can get on with the business of dissecting the incredibly appalling speech delivered by the Prime Minister in the Chamber today.  
You would expect would you not Mr Assistant Speaker—well I know Mr Robertson would because he is a man who has been around Parliament a long time—that a Prime Minister’s speech might in some way be inspirational. One would expect it might be a little bit uplifting and might tell people that there is great hope for a big future in this country. But what we got from this Prime Minister was just what her comment to the media yesterday had suggested: this was to be a boring speech so they should not cover it and because she was not going to say anything exciting they should not look for that. That seems to typify the message the Government gives to New Zealanders. Government members say they want to be in Government and people should give them their votes but people should not expect anything from them and should not ask anything of them. They say they will lead people nowhere and people can be happy with that. That is not the recipe for a long-term Government. Government members are tired are out of ideas and are out of time. We will see them march through to 2005 sadly pulling themselves to bits as they face the wrath of the voter.  
I look at that speech and I see the Prime Minister desperately trying to appeal to some sector of the Minister’s community by saying she understands the concepts advanced by Professor Michael Porter a very able fellow who had a view on how New Zealand should develop itself. The Government is picking up on one little bit that he suggested would be a good idea 12 years ago. I want to tell the Prime Minister that Michael Porter also said that it was appropriate for a Government and in fact essential for a Government interested in economic growth to establish a stable and predictable macro-political and legal environment. What did we get from the Prime Minister today? We had a commitment to dismantle the legal structure in this country. It is a legal structure that is paralleled in Britain. It is a legal structure that has given foreign investors and others huge confidence in a country like New Zealand. The Government wants to replace that legal structure with a sort of Supreme Court of New Zealand entirely appointed by none other than Margaret Wilson. That will be good for business!  
The next thing Michael Porter said was that we should improve the availability quality and efficiency of our general-purpose imports our infrastructure and our institutions. What did we get from the Prime Minister? We had a few more commitments about roads and more commitments to discuss a bit of an idea that maybe by the middle of the year we might have an idea about where the transport legislation is going.  
 Quite surreptitiously we see here in the Prime Minister’s statement that the Government is to work towards a form of legislative control around the allocation of fresh water. That brings me to my portfolio area of energy. At the moment that looks to be an area where this Government will fail quite considerably and I will relate fresh water to that in a few moments. But I will read here a very interesting comment released from the Sustainable Energy Forum the other day with regard to the Maui gasfield which this Minister has known for 15 months would run out sooner than had been expected. He has done nothing to encourage extra exploration and has sat on his hands for 15 months knowing that there was a problem coming. He would probably have come in here to the House and said he is aware of things that we are not and he cannot tell us about them. That is the sort of thing we get from this Government all the time and it leads to comments from the Sustainable Energy Forum such as: “Gas availability data has become a farce of mismanagement. By failing in its duty of care for the public’s interest in this nation’s resource the Government has led New Zealand into a crisis of confidence in the energy industry.”  
The Prime Minister talks about growing the economy but at the same time says that it will not grow as fast as it should because the Government really does not know how to make it do so and then the Government puts in place all sorts of road blocks to prevent that happening. The thing that will drive an economy—the energy available to our industries—is facing a crisis of confidence in our Government. I support the motion moved by Bill English. We all have no confidence in this Government and that will become clearer and clearer as we go along.  
I suspect that the allocation of fresh water talked about in the Prime Minister’s statement is code for the Government deciding to control fresh water in this country which means that we will not see further development of the hydro potential. If one reads further through the speech one discovers that fresh water is described as somehow being a taonga. We will be in big trouble there because the energy potential of most of the lakes will probably be classified as unusable. On the other hand the gas industry is now admitting that there is a huge crisis of confidence and it does not know where to go. What consumers in this country can expect from the Government in the short term is cold houses because there is no gas to heat them and much much higher prices. I find it amazing that people are talking about the price of gas at the well head going up from $2.15 to $6. If I am wrong the Minister should come down to the House and say so. But he will not do that because he knows it will happen. He knows that he has waited and done nothing for 15 months and the situation has come as no surprise to him.  
I will add to the whole picture of this Government not knowing where it is going by running through a few of the things that it has said it wants to do. Let us take last year when we were going to have sustainable growth at 4 percent. We got to 3.8 percent by good luck and I suspect on the back of debt-driven consumerism. We are now in the position of saying that growth will slip back a bit. Rather than doing something to speed it up the Government is to introduce holidays legislation that will come down heavily on employers.  
I have talked about the Supreme Court. That will remove a lot of the confidence that foreign investors have. I have talked about the fact that the Government has no idea at all about where to take infrastructural issues inside this country. Then we see the other little thing in this statement that I think everyone should be worried about: amendments to the Hazardous Substances and New Organisms Act to coincide with the expiry of the moratorium on genetic modification. That should send shivers up the spine of every scientist in this country who thinks that he or she has some research that might advance the economic prospects of this country.  
We are left with a document from the Prime Minister that was cleverly written to be as boring as it possibly could be so that no one would have a decent look at it and the concept being advanced that the Government knows what it is doing and people should not ask questions or expect anything because the Government will not give them anything. I repeat what I said before: Mr English is absolutely right; no one should have any confidence in this Government.