Williamson Maurice: General Debate 
Williamson Maurice: General Debate 
[Volume:648;Page:17339] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) 
: 
 I want to start by referring members of this House to some statements that the Rt Hon Helen Clark made in the run-up to becoming the Prime Minister. In November 1999 she said: “If we’re elected to Government then my commitment is that we will deliver a Government people can trust. It will be open and it will be accountable.” She said on 23 April 1999: “My Government will set new standards both in terms of behaviour and performance so that we govern for the people and are accountable to them.” In February 1995 she said: “The style of Government I will lead as Prime Minister will be open and participatory.” 
I welcome all those comments from Helen Clark but I do not believe New Zealanders can stomach for one moment the claims we heard in the House today that the  
Cabinet Manual 
 is but a guide about performance. I was a Minister for 9 years and I knew that that was the rule book—that was the absolute rule book. If one broke that  
Cabinet Manual 
 rule book one was gone and therefore we read it very carefully. I know that Ministers in the Labour Party will have read it very carefully. One is not to accept gifts. One is not to accept donations beyond certain levels without declaring them unless one is happy for one’s career to be over. 
Under the heading of what gets “curiouser and curiouser” I want to ask a couple of questions. Mr Peters claims he did not know about the $100000 paid towards his legal fees from Mr Owen Glenn. Until Friday when he was told he said he did not know. Well here is my first question. Mr Peters went on television back in February and held up a big sign saying “No”. He said he did not receive money from Owen Glenn. Do members not believe that his lawyer or his party president or somebody in the New Zealand First Party would have got to Mr Peters within 5 seconds of the finish of that television interview and said: “Winston Winston please don’t pursue that line any further you may regret it.”? I have to say that if the party president or Brian Henry did not get to Mr Peters straight away after that interview they were setting him up because Mr Peters from that point on kept denying it. Those people could have ended his misery any time from February until today by saying “Winston excuse me. Best you don’t do that again.” Last week there he was at the airport saying: “I do not have my ‘No’ sign with me but what part of ‘No’ don’t you understand?”. If that is not hanging a member out to dry I do not know what is. 
Under the heading of “curiouser and curiouser” how about the cheque that Dail Jones saw that went into the New Zealand First bank account? I have this quotation from him: “I saw the money. It was somewhere between $10000 and $100000 probably closer to $100000.” He then said: “I discovered the donation in the party’s bank account in December and I asked the bank where it came from and they could not tell me.” Now that means the bank is in breach of all the financial disclosure regulations in this country. Banks are not allowed to transact cheques of more than $10000 without being able to trace where they came from. That is in order to stop money-laundering crooked behaviour and so on. So it is not possible that the bank could not tell Mr Jones where that cheque came from—because it was over $10000. 
Suddenly the cheque disappeared again—it was gone. Now we are told it went off to Mr Brian Henry’s trust account. But as my colleague Judith Collins who was a member of the Law Society—in fact she was president of the Auckland District Law Society—said barristers cannot hold trust accounts. So the money had to have gone somewhere else. I put it to members of the Labour Government that if they had a $300000 mortgage and every month their statement came in saying the mortgage was still $300000 until one day in came a statement that said it was only $200000 they would want to know how that happened. They would want to know and if a member still had money owing to his or her lawyer and suddenly the bill changed by $100000 that member would want to know. The fact that Mr Henry left Mr Peters out to dry all this year by not telling him means that something rotten is afoot.