Shearer DavidDAVID SHEARER (Labour—Mt Albert): As Attorney-General you have to stand up every now and then and give these sorts of speeches in Parliament where you know deep down in your heart that there is something deeply wrong. That sounded a lot like a lawyer defending somebody he knew was guilty and was going down and he had to give him the best send-off that he could. That is what it was—it was a send-off. The risk here is about New Zealand's reputation. That is what it is. We have a reputation for transparency for honesty for non-corruption and Mr McCully has sullied that reputation. It is one of the reasons why our ranking by Transparency International has gone from No. 1 to No. 4. It is because Mr McCully has used this backroom creative accounting—creative solution as the Prime Minister calls it—but it is more about corruption in the minds of New Zealanders when they hear this. This is a backroom deal. It is one of Mr McCully's loose hip-pocket avoid scrutiny at all costs type of remedies for a problem that actually does not exist. Let us start with one major—one major—fallacy that has been brought up not only by Mr McCully but by the Attorney-General today that somehow the Government inherited this problem. It did not inherit this problem. We banned live sheep exports in 2004 when 5000 sheep died. There was no public appetite no public appetite whatsoever for live sheep exports from New Zealand to around the world. That is the reality. The New Zealand Government that Government in 2009 reaffirmed that there were going to be no live sheep exports and it did it a second time—two times it reaffirmed that and Mr Key said himself that there was no appetite in the New Zealand public for the resumption of live sheep export. That—that—is fact so do not put it on this side of the House. They agreed with it and they know that the public is not behind them on it. So let us just get that right out of the way from the very beginning. The Attorney-General talked about this purple prose. He did mention the word transparency. Well let us read what the Auditor-General said about transparency: This lack of transparency both at the time of the decision and subsequently has led to the concerns from the New Zealand public about the nature of the payments made. To date explanations from Ministers or officials have not resolved those public concerns." The people do not believe the Government. Let us go back and remind ourselves what actually happened here. What actually happened? Six million dollars was paid to the Al-Khalaf Group to set up an agricultural hub in the middle of the Saudi desert—the middle of the Saudi desert. It was a disgrace. Rather than highlighting New Zealand's agriculture it was a new low—a new low—and $4 million was paid directly to the Al-Khalaf Group. Then we put 900 pregnant ewes on a Singapore Airlines flight and flew them to the hub where 75 percent of those lambs that were born died. My God if New Zealand wanted to advertise itself as an agricultural powerhouse you could not do any worse to its reputation than that. That was Mr McCully's big grand plan. Why? Let us ask the reason why we did that. Well the Attorney-General just explained that it was because we were going to be threatened with a suit of $30 million—and to just accept that. Except that we had absolutely—absolutely—no evidence that that was going to happen. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) has yet to come up—has yet to come up—with any sort of evidence that shows that that was about to happen. The Al-Khalaf Group—let us ask them. They said no they were never intending to sue. They were never going to sue. Treasury was not informed about what this payment was and what it was for and why it was being handled. There were absolutely no grounds that we were going to be sued and even then it was $13 million. Yet we New Zealand our taxpayers our hard-earned tax money was handed over to Mr Khalaf in that ridiculous way—in that ridiculous way. So that is the first reason. That is the first reason why we paid over $11.5 million of taxpayers' money to a shonky backroom deal that Mr McCully came up with. The second reason was that we were about to get a free-trade agreement which of course has not happened. We have not yet got a free-trade agreement. There is lots of purple prose about how it is imminent and how it is coming. We do not know anything about whether Mr Al Khalaf was responsible for the progress or whether that progress might have happened in any case. If we are to believe Mr McCully this is about Mr McCully paying a Saudi businessman a large sum of money in order for that Saudi businessman to then put pressure on the Saudi Government to enable us to have a free-trade agreement. So what does that sound like to you? What does that sound like to people in New Zealand? That is the sort of thing that goes on in other countries but I did not think it would go on here in New Zealand. I do not care what the Auditor-General says. That to me sounds like her definition of a bribe that she has laid out in the table in this report. That is what it sounds like to me. In addition to that let us go through the Cabinet paper that Mr McCully's office—as opposed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade—put together in its backroom. All of these things were not answered in the Cabinet paper yet we agreed to hand over the money. It did not identify how the $10 million figure was arrived at. Why not $20 million? Why not $5 million? Why not $3 million? Who knows? It was just a number that Mr McCully dreamt up. It signalled that the risk of a claim against the Government was based on $20 million to $30 million but we do not know whether it was going to be $20 million to $30 million $100 million $2 million or as I have just said whether it was unlikely to ever have happened. It did not include any analysis about whether there were any other potential obstacles about getting a free-trade agreement. Maybe there were other things. It actually happened to go down the tubes at around the same time as the global financial crisis and we know that was a factor too. It identified that New Zealand exports could double with a free-trade agreement but without any analysis about how it could double. The Auditor-General said: "Based on these … shortcomings I am concerned at the lack of robust analysis and the quality of information that was provided to Cabinet on this matter." Mr McCully had this creative solution but had absolutely nothing behind it. It was a shambolic shambles of a document. You have only to read it to think: "I don't know how that got through the Minister of Foreign Affairs. I expected better from their lawyers and their people." This did not even go through them; this came from Murray McCully's office straight into Cabinet—straight into Cabinet—without going through the pre-Cabinet committee meetings. This is a disgrace. It puts New Zealand's reputation at a low ebb. It has circulated widely that somehow New Zealand rather than being a transparent open country that would never resort to payments to business people in order to get favours has done exactly that—has done exactly that. I think it is a real shame and if you want to pick the eyes out of this and say that nobody was corrupt and nobody paid bribes and nobody benefited individually except for obviously the Al-Khalaf Group and Murray McCully did not pocket any money—I did not expect that it would find that but what it has shown is that this was a shambles. It was an utter shambles and the Government should actually be ashamed of itself that it has got this far. It has brought great discredit to New Zealand's reputation."