English Bill: General Debate 
English Bill: General Debate 
[Volume:646;Page:15499] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Leader—National) 
: 
 The Hon David Cunliffe is no Shakespeare. Here is his poetry. It is called “I am Harvard” and reads: 
For one short year or two 
I suckled you 
with potent milk 
of truth and learning. 
You know my strength 
you know my weakness. 
They are in you 
for I am Harvard 
And I am yours. 
Too right we know his weakness! 
But it is his predecessor as Minister of Health who worries me and that is Annette King. What we have seen with the booklet  
We’re Making a Difference for Everyone 
 is Labour’s voracious sense of entitlement to public money. Labour members have a voracious sense of entitlement to public money for Labour’s partisan purposes. As John Key said one would think they would have learnt. Absolutely nothing has happened in the last few months in respect of this booklet that is different from what happened before the last election with the same people and the same material. Mike Smith Heather Whatever-her-name-is in the Prime Minister’s office and Mike Williams cooked up the pledge card using $800000 of public money. They worked out how to spend that money in a way that escaped the election cap and this year they have set out the same people to do the same thing all over again—the same thing. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of public money has been spent on Labour’s partisan material. One would think those people would have learnt but they did not. 
But it is worse than their not learning because in between times they wrote the rules to stop it. Is that not hard to believe? Not only did they not learn from having to pay back $800000 they stole from the public for the Labour Party coffers but in the meantime they lectured everyone else about breaking the rules then they wrote the rules to stop it then they went and did it even though they had just spent 2 years writing the rules to stop it. 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: What’s that called? 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Well I cannot think of a name for it. It is absolutely unbelievable—and some other words we cannot use in this House. Here is the question: did they know they were breaking the rules? The answer is yes. How could they not know? How could they not know when this House went over the electoral finance legislation in detail week after week last year? How could Heather Simpson Mike Smith Michael Cullen and Helen Clark not know? They set out to deliberately steal taxpayers’ money again. That is not just hypocrisy and deceit; they deliberately set out to steal taxpayers’ money again and the horrible beauty of it is that they got caught and they got off. When did that happen before? It happened before the last election. They got caught with the $800000 and they got off. 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: Groundhog Day. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Groundhog Day. And what else has happened again? The Minister of Justice made an undertaking that this pamphlet would be added to Labour’s election expenses. When did they do that before? Five days before the 2005 election they promised the Electoral Commission—not just a media journalist or a politician but an electoral official—that the $800000 would be added to their electoral expenses because the Electoral Commission had been tracking them for weeks to make them do it. Two days after the election they withdrew that promise and they did not put that sum on the election return. What do we call that coming from a Government that is meant to be upholding the rule of law in this country? 
The person responsible for it all is Helen Clark. She oversaw it last time and she is overseeing it this time. That is a disgrace to this Parliament. It is a disgrace to this country that our Prime Minister is stealing taxpayers’ money.