Shearer David: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeShearer David: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 28 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5383. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert): I just want to touch on the speech from Nicky Wagner from before. What she failed to talk about in her speech was the JBMS—the Joint Border Management System—that her Customs Service has been overseeing. It has run off-budget—$30 million off-budget. It has not delivered what she said it was going to deliver and now we have the old system and the new system—the CusMod system and the Joint Border Management System—running side by side duplicating each other’s work. What a shemozzle. And if that was not the only thing wrong with the Customs Service here is another thing: there is the highest number of churn through that department than any other Government department and there is the lowest morale in the Customs Service. There are serious things wrong with the Customs Service. It is the staff who are not happy and the information systems that have failed and that is what this Minister of Customs is not getting on to.But anyway I want to move on to foreign affairs. We came on to the United Nations Security Council this year. It is good that New Zealand is represented there. We were all very proud of that and we are currently right now this month in the presidency—there is a rotating presidency and New Zealand holds the presidency in the United Nations Security Council. Murray McCully said that there were three things he wanted to do: he wanted to solve the Middle East peace process he wanted to solve the issue of the veto in the United Nations Security Council and he wanted to do some work on bringing up the issues and the interests of small developing States. Well we have not heard anything about small developing States; we have heard a bit about solving the Middle East peace process and at the moment we have got 3 days left in July and we still have not quite got on top of it; and we still have not knocked off the veto in the United Nations Security Council. This may play well to a New Zealand audience but to an international audience it sounds woefully out of touch and incredibly naive. We can obviously do some work to progress these issues but coming out and saying somehow New Zealand is going to turn those things round is—well look I wish him all the best but in anybody’s reckoning it is wishful thinking.Meanwhile the Government has done this—and I want to just run through this little story. There are 900 sheep in the South Island 300 owned by Mr Al Ali Khalaf. The Government and Murray McCully really without very much consultation with any of his colleagues decided to buy 300 sheep for Mr Al Ali Khalaf fly them courtesy of Singapore Airlines to Saudi Arabia to Mr Al Ali Khalaf’s farm and give them to Mr Al Ali Khalaf. Can you believe that? This is a true story. This is a true story. You could write about this and nobody would believe you. And then those 900 sheep that sit there in Saudi Arabia are all pregnant ewes and 700 of their lambs die. This is supposed to be a model farm that New Zealand is going to be advertising its wares from. Incredible—what an incredible fiasco and debacle.The reason we did that according to the Government is because the Labour Government said that we were banning the export of live sheep and it had upset Mr Al Ali Khalaf. Well actually this Government extended the ban on live sheep exports in 2010 but somehow that was the problem. Mr Al Ali Khalaf was supposed to be suing New Zealand because we had taken away some of his rights. The only thing is that the Government will not release the papers that show what Mr Al Ali Khalaf was likely to do. Mr McCully says: “Oh we actually had a legal opinion on this.” Well he will not release the legal opinion and they certainly will not release any information about whether they sought a second legal opinion perhaps from the Crown Law Office—absolute debacle.But then there is another reason. There is another reason and that reason is that somehow this is going to block a free-trade agreement that New Zealand is going to have with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States. I want you to reflect on this: if a company had said that they were going to be paying a Saudi businessman this sort of money what would we call it? We would call it a bribe. That is what we would call it and that is exactly what it is and yet Mr McCully has entered the New Zealand Government into a bribe.