Parker David: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeParker David: General Debate[Sitting date: 01 July 2015. Volume:706;Page:4997. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour): Can I acknowledge the outgoing Clerk of the House Mary Harris and thank her for her wonderful efforts through the years.I want to talk about the Saudi sheep scandal. One of the things that the New Zealand population relies upon the Government to do is to hold up standards of decency freedom from corruption and fair dealing in the world. Those are very very important to New Zealand’s reputation. Indeed they are one of the reasons why we secured the Security Council membership that we are taking up just today. It is with great shame I think that Mr McCully has sullied that reputation through this Saudi sheep scandal which we did not know anything about until 2 months ago.From his perspective and from John Key’s perspective it is just another deal. That is how they see the world. They have got no standards. They do not see this as being wrong and that is why they make these fundamental mistakes that—Paul Foster-Bell: What a load of rubbish.Hon DAVID PARKER: What rubbish? Well we have got the history of the Skycity deal where they sold casino rights in a secret behind-closed-doors deal which was criticised by the Auditor-General. We had the Warner Bros deal. We are now living in a country where lobbying and special pleading gets you a special leg-up from this Government and nowhere is this worse than in respect of this Saudi sheep scandal.Two years ago essentially the deal was done. The Government approved some payout to Mr Al Khalaf and this so-called model farm in the desert and yet we heard nothing about it until earlier this year when Minister Guy went to this so-called model farm in the desert and said things that were preposterous but none the less he talked it up. In fact he said amongst other things that it was going to be a model of the way we do farming. There is no model farm in the world that the Government has funded other than this one and so the media started to pay attention. They thought that there was something fishy about this and they started to dig and it was actually the media that got on to this story before politicians did. I pay my respects to the fourth estate because I think it has done a good job on this.The next thing that happened was that the $6 million figure paid for this bizarre farm in the desert turned into a higher figure because someone leaked that the sheep had been flown to the other side of the world at the cost of $1 million. This is when we had the first of the cartoons starting to appear making a mockery of the Government. It says: “Last time I’ll travel on this line … no deck quoits no pokie machines no mah-jong no swimming pool …”. The Government was starting to be made fun of because it was just bizarre that we were flying sheep to the other side of the world.Then the day before this long-overdue Cabinet paper which the Government has hidden since 2013 came out Mr McCully said: “Oh actually the total is now $11 million.” What was the difference between the $6 million and the $11 million other than the $1 million that the Government spent on flights? There was a $4 million payment which has been unpicked as a facilitation payment to buy off Mr Al Khalaf. That is called a bribe in other countries. I am not suggesting that the money went into Mr McCully’s pocket—there is no suggestion of that—but it is wrong of this Government to bribe a foreign person who is getting in the way of a free-trade agreement and that is what happened.How have we proved that? We have proved that because initially Mr McCully in this House blamed the prior Labour Government and said that we had left behind a $20 million to $30 million legal risk. So the obvious question was: well why did no one tell us that? Check with the Prime Minister the Deputy Prime Minister former Ministers of Trade and former Ministers of Foreign Affairs—that is Clark Cullen Peters Goff Anderton and Sutton. None of them have heard about it because it was an untruth—it was an untruth. We unpicked that.Then Mr McCully admitted that there was no live legal claim—in fact none had been filed. Then the Prime Minister admitted that there was no cause of action. He admitted that to the National Business Review and still the Government pretends that this was a payment for good value rather than to get Mr Al Khalaf out of the way of the free-trade agreement. It was a disgraceful episode.Then we had the bizarre thing where the Minister for Primary Industries said that the 75 percent lamb losses were caused by a desert storm. “Sandstorm” he said. I kid you not. This was a cause of more mirth amongst the media. We had this from him: “There’s a lot of sand in the desert and the wind can get it up and that caused all those lambs to die. Yeah that’s what I reckon happened.” That is what he said. They were all over the place. On the same day we had the contractors saying that they died as a consequence of a rain event.