Goff Phil: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGoff Phil: General Debate[Sitting date: 01 April 2015. Volume:704;Page:2807. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill): National did not just lose the Northland electorate; it was trounced. That was an electorate it had held for 50 years and it turned a 9000 majority into a deficit of 4000—a turn-round of 13000 votes. To Jo Goodhew if that is her name who says that that was because of the Labour Party giving it away I want to say that Northland was no Epsom. Epsom was a National seat that National gifted to the ACT Party to keep it alive when it had no support anywhere in the country. It gifted a National seat. Labour was never going to win Northland and certainly some Labour voters voted tactically. But a lot of the support that National lost was from people who had voted National last time and who became disillusioned with a Government they regarded as tired arrogant and ineffectual.I want to make this point too. This was not as the National Party would now have us believe just a local contest. Northland was covered with electoral hoardings from the National Party with whose face on them?Hon Member: John Key.Hon PHIL GOFF: John Key’s. John Key went up there time and again. The only time he did not go up there was on election night when just as in the case of the Mt Albert by-election he left his candidate floundering and did not stand behind the poor unfortunate Mark Osborne who caught the flack of an electorate that was disillusioned with National.Sitting opposite me is Simon “10” Bridges—Simon “10” Bridges—who reflects the fact that this Government in a way I cannot remember in 30 years went out to pork barrel Northland to try to buy votes. Ten bridges $70 million no cost-benefit analysis no prioritisation—an absolute bribe. National thought that the Northland people would be stupid enough to buy that bribe. Well Simon “10” Bridges should not have the cheek to be speaking up and interjecting now. He was part of the failure of this National Government as was John Key and as was the maestro Steven Joyce who masterminded National to its worst ever defeat in a by-election. The killer blow was not delivered by anybody but National members. They shot themselves in the foot. They reminded Northlanders how long they and the other regions had been neglected and they thought that Northlanders were stupid enough to fall for the bait.Well I say that New Zealanders have had enough of the game-playing they have had enough of the lack of transparency they have had enough of the sense of entitlement and they have certainly had a gutsful of the arrogance. This is the beginning of the crumbling of the foundations of this National Government. You can tell by the agitated state of those backbenchers in the National Party that they know they will not be here after the next election.We have seen cynicism after cynicism. New Zealanders support having a Security Intelligence Service to deal with terrorism and to deal with economic crime. They do not support a Prime Minister who rorts the Security Intelligence Service for party political purposes and who colludes with Cameron Slater. They do not support a party that lies to the country about what it was doing. They do not support the Security Intelligence Service being misused to get a person elected to the World Trade Organization. The Government is losing friends all across the world because it was using the Security Intelligence Service for the wrong purposes. Finally they do not support a National Government that starves the country of money for education for health and for policing—for all of the good things—but that has money to bribe that has money to subsidise a casino making a profit and that has money to splash out on a local charter school at Whangaruru that is failing while it is denying kids from disadvantaged backgrounds the chance to have a full stomach and learn in the classroom like everybody else.