Williamson Maurice: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliamson Maurice: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 12 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1585. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga):I first want to say a great big thankyou to our party whips for having let me get a speaking slot at this time of day. My adoring drive time audience in Auckland who will be crawling home at a snail’s pace and taking an hour or an hour and a half to go only 15 to 20 kilometres will all be listening with bated breath. But I have got only a short slot and in a short slot it is wise to stick to only one subject. I was going to get into the rhythm method that Judith Collins has been talking about. I think that the rhythm method is obviously what Labour has been applying for some time. It is not working and Labour needs to look for something else.I want to give Labour some advice. I have done this before during drive time on Radio Live and so on and Labour does not seem to listen to that but I am going to do it again. It is really simple—it is really simple. The voting public actually vote on only one thing in the end. They do not vote on whether you knew Kim Dotcom before or after a certain date—they do not vote on this. They actually vote on one simple thing: “Is this Government taking the place in the right direction and will my family and so on be better off with it or is it tired bored arrogant and out of touch and it is time to kick it out?”.When the time for a change comes you cannot withstand it. I have been on either side of it. In 1990 National had only to show up to win. In fact sadly we won a whole lot of seats we really should not have won and we ended up with a few people who were probably more trouble than they were worth. I think I am actually sadly on record as calling them in this Chamber a bunch of dingbats dipsticks and dorks and I regret that—I regret it immensely. But we did have a huge win in 1990 and we did not need to promise anything; we just had to show up because the Labour Party in 1990 was in complete freefall imploding and gone. But I have been on the other side of it. I can tell you that in 1999 I used to go up to Premier House and sit with Jenny Shipley at night thinking about what we would try to do as part of the campaign to reinvigorate where we were. And guess what! Every day we announced the next thing thinking that would be it and the next night we found we had dropped two more points in the polls because the time for a change had come and you just cannot fight against that tsunami as it comes.That is how simple it is. What attracts the public to whether it is time for this lot to be swiped out or not is their own self-interest. It is the things they talk about around the breakfast table. So Andrew Little is quite right to focus on whether taxpayers’ money should be going off to Skycity to give it a big subsidy to run some massive convention centre because that matters. Your ordinary members of the public will say “I don’t actually like the idea of that.” I do not think that Steven Joyce Bill English or John Key like the idea of it based on the comments I have heard.But if you want to stick to your knitting about things that matter do not just suddenly throw a grenade in there about Māori sovereignty. Because I can tell you—and I want any other member in this House to tell me whether I am wrong. How many people have raised that with them in their electorate over the last 3 years? How many people have walked up to me in the Pakuranga shopping centre and said: “Until I hear you guys firmly on the ground of some Māori sovereignty so they can have some more control over their rules and their laws and so on I’m not voting for you again.”? Not one. Not a sausage not a mutter not a murmur. So he just blew all of his good work and it was not actually that good. He was a better leader than anybody else Labour has had because he was not making mistakes or slipping up but my message to the Labour Party is that when your time comes it comes and when it does not you are wasting your time.Think about big brands. Microsoft controlled the world for about 15 years and no one could touch it. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple it was 90 days away from insolvency and being put into bankruptcy—just about gone. And now it is poor old Microsoft that cannot come up with a new product that anyone wants. Vista was a disaster Windows 8 did not work or Windows 8.1. It has even scrapped Windows 9. It is going to go straight to Windows 10 and it still cannot make it and the company that was insolvent called Apple is now booming and it is the richest company in the world. Because the public like the brand they like where it is going and they are not going to change.So my message to the Labour Party is simply this—and this is really aimed at a couple of people. First of all Andrew Little and his Māori sovereignty—but to hear Jacinda Ardern today using question time to talk about the National Library changing from the book-based system to an internet-based system and making more stuff available online. I mean for God’s sake this is like the candle industry being upset when electricity and lightbulbs were starting to come in. The National Library needs changing like you would not believe to come into the 21st century and maybe stop off at the 19th and 20th along the way. And here she is using question time to raise an issue that not one person has raised.So the message to Labour is this. This Government has taken the country in the right direction for 6 years the public like it but we must never take that for granted because they could easily easily decide within no time at all you lot are gone. But right now Labour had better get its act together because it looks so dishevelled and is pointing in so many different directions. There is a word for it emanating from the centre pointing in all directions: quaquaversal.