Robertson Grant: Member Vacancy — Epsom Electoral District—Hon John BanksText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRobertson Grant: Member Vacancy — Epsom Electoral District—Hon John Banks[Sitting date: 18 June 2014. Volume:699;Page:18651. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central):The Labour Party is of course supporting this motion. We do not believe that there should be a by-election held at this time so close to the general election. As other speakers have pointed out anyone who is actually elected in any by-election would not be able to take up their seat in this House at all. Also I do not think that the people of Epsom should be put through the charade that National puts them through every election again and again. We have already heard from David Parker about the sight of Paul Goldsmith pulling his own electorate hoardings out of the ground trying desperately to stop people from voting for him. The people of Epsom do not need that. We have already seen in this period leading up to the election in 2014 that Paul Goldsmith will not show up to debates and that Michael Wood the very excellent Labour candidate in the Epsom electorate has provided for the people of Epsom a substitute in the form of a bag of flour. That bag of flour is making some great comments compared with Mr Goldsmith recently and that is what National puts the people of Epsom through.I do on that note want to say that I think that National members are coming across the “three strikes and you’re out” law for themselves. They might want to make the people of Epsom go through the farce of an election where they do not want their candidate to win they might want the people of Ōhāriu to have to keep voting for Peter Dunne despite all of the murk and mess around what has happened to him in this term but if they try it on one more time in the East Coast Bays to get Colin Craig up and push Murray McCully out I predict that that will be “three strikes and you’re out” for manipulation of the electoral system by National. The people of New Zealand rightly have expected National to come forward with some changes to the MMP laws and rules because that is what the Electoral Commission got charged with doing. People worked very hard to produce a report which was then put back to the Minister of Justice Judith Collins who quite frankly did absolutely nothing to try to get the kind of cross-party support that would be required.The Minister did that deliberately because she did not want to face up to the fact that it is National that has twice now rorted the system—and I predict a third time. It will try to use the system in a way that goes against what New Zealanders believe is fair and right. In that Electoral Commission report there were recommendations that could have got broad-based support across this Parliament. The Labour Party has a member’s bill in the name of Iain Lees-Galloway to do away with the coat-tailing to reduce the threshold for entry of parties into Parliament and to help tidy up the MMP legislation which New Zealanders were promised in the wake of the referendum. This is what New Zealanders were promised in the wake of the referendum. Instead the very thing that brought John Banks to this Parliament the very deal that brought John Banks to this Parliament continues to be protected by National rather than be followed through on what the Electoral Commission asked and what New Zealanders were led to believe they would get. It would be a major stain on this system that we have now if National goes for three deals three cups of tea around the country—but I predict that is what it will do and I think it will suffer for that.I want to speak briefly about John Banks. I respect the fact that colleagues in this House who have known Mr Banks over a long period of time have said that they have mixed views about him. I do not actually have a particular desire to dance on his political grave. I will say this though. I have been prevented in this House from calling John Banks a liar because we have rules about the way we treat one another when we are members of Parliament. The problem we have had for nearly 2 years is that John Banks was lying. He lied to New Zealanders he lied to this House he lied to John Key and he lied to the police. That is what John Banks did and we have not been able to say that because he was in here so it is important to put that on record. This was not a pursuit of a matter of insignificance. This was the pursuit of a person who was a member of Parliament who has now been found guilty of electoral fraud.The reason why the maximum sentence for that crime is 2 years is because it is regarded as so serious. The reason why Mr Banks would inevitably have had to resign even though he has done it before a conviction has been entered is because of the length of the sentence. The length of the sentence has been set in law because this is an extremely serious matter. As MPs we all know that when we sign off on our returns after an election it is us who are responsible for them. We are the people who have to stand up and say to New Zealanders that we have followed the rules. John Banks did not. He broke the rules he knew that he broke the rules and that is why he has had to resign. Mr Banks called it a tragedy. I think it has had more elements of a farce than a tragedy to be honest with you. But the tragedy here is that the law was broken and the trust in all of us as politicians gets compromised when people do this. All of us—we know that. Everyone across the House knows that it ends up being a stain on all politicians and that is why it is good and right that this went through the process.I do want to comment briefly on the question of whether the police should have prosecuted this. Mr Finlayson in his list of what happened was factual but he paused at a point and that is the point at which the police decided not to prosecute. The police did not take advice from Crown Law about whether they should prosecute. They made that decision themselves. As Trevor Mallard has said they have acknowledged that decision was wrong it was incorrect and I welcome an Independent Police Conduct Authority investigation into this because anybody who looks at the facts of what happened in this case would have concluded that it should have gone through to prosecution and we look forward to the outcome of that.The person I want to talk about tonight is actually John Key because John Banks’ resignation should have come far far earlier in this process. In the judgment that was brought down on Mr Banks the concept of wilful blindness is the most important concept within that judgment and it is John Key’s wilful blindness that went on here. He deliberately hung on to John Banks to prop up his Government. John Key is on the record as saying he would do whatever it takes to be in Government. Well what it took was to cling on to somebody who he knew was not being upfront with New Zealanders who he knew was not telling the truth when he was being questioned about this. John Key has gone on the record and said that John Banks is a thoroughly honest man. Well the problem for John Key is that that has now been proven in a court to not be the case.John Key deliberately did not look into that. Day after day I stood up in this House and I asked John Key questions about the police report into this case and day after day John Key said he would not read that report. He refused to read the police report because he did not want to know what was in it. That is the kind of wilful blindness that this Prime Minister is now becoming known for. That is the kind of approach that he said he would not do. He said he would lift the standards of ministerial behaviour and he has completely failed to do that. So John Banks should have resigned but he should have resigned a lot earlier.John Key actually said this. This is one of the answers he gave in the House to a question when we asked whether it was right that John Banks was still here. He said: “There is quite a wide definition of ethics. The test I have to apply is the law. I think he did exactly what he’d always said which was comply with the law.” If John Key had read the police report back in 2012 he would never have said that. He would never have said that because it simply was not borne out by the facts. The Cabinet Manual tells Ministers they must uphold the law act lawfully and behave in a way that upholds and is seen to uphold the highest ethical standards. For months and months in this House it was clear that John Banks had not done that and yet John Key refused to act. John Key refused to do anything to call him to account for what he had done.In November 2008 John Key said: “I expect high standards from my Ministers … if they don’t [meet these standards I set] then obviously I will take action …”. John Key did not do that. John Key hung on to John Banks for electoral convenience and that is a stain on his Government and on this whole House. John Banks has been found guilty of electoral fraud. He has resigned. He should have resigned earlier. The fact that he did not sits at the feet of John Key. The fact is that John Key was prepared to hold on to his slim majority in this House no matter what to pass legislation like the asset sales legislation and to pass legislation that was bad for New Zealand in the course of this—charter schools coming in. The one good thing is that we will not get the employment relations law passed because of that.There should not be a by-election in Epsom but this is not a happy day. This is a sad day because a member of Parliament has committed electoral fraud and National continues to stand for that kind of behaviour.