Maharey Steve: General Debates 
Maharey Steve: General Debates 
[Volume:619;Page:15246] 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY (Minister for Social Development and Employment) 
: 
 I move  
That the House take note of miscellaneous business 
. It is a bad time to be a National MP and I have some very bad news for the National MPs: things can only get worse. They will get worse because it is now clear that the gamble to put in a first-term MP—a man who has never won a single election on his own has never been in Government before and has always been in the monastic cloister of the Reserve Bank—as the leader of the National Party has backfired. 
Increasingly the leader of the National Party looks like a ferret stuck in the headlights of an oncoming car. He cannot go around the country because if he does the media cane him. He cannot come back into the House because if he does the Government canes him. So Don Brash tried a new tactic this week: he sat in the House for an hour and a half and did nothing—nothing at all. Finally before question time finished he got up and tried to walk out unnoticed. Frankly he had been unnoticed until that time because he had done nothing. Don Brash looks like a ferret and a truck is coming. Its headlights are on and he is about to be run over because the National Party— 
Simon Power 
: Point of order— 
Mr SPEAKER 
: The member has gone too far. All members of this House are honourable members and to start to equate members with animals does lead to retaliation which becomes rather silly. I ask the member to withdraw and apologise. 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: I withdraw and apologise. That truck is coming because the National Party always changes its leader. Since we have been the Government National has had three leaders already and Mr Key who stays in the Chamber is already looking around eagerly waiting to move from the second bench to the first bench. He is the most ambitious first-time MP since Don Brash really to sit in this House. 
Not only has National had three changes of leader but it has changed the deputy leader four times already since the last election. National has reshuffled so often it forgot to move the senior whip off the front bench. It reshuffles all the time because it has no talent. What National ends up doing as a result is that it pushes as hard as Mr English did this week. He pushed very hard on the issue of Hauraki Plains College. He came in with a box and he sat behind that box. When we finally got the box and opened it we found the box had nothing in it at all to prove Mr English’s claims that Hauraki Plains College had done the wrong thing. He confessed that today and he has apologised. It is no wonder he apologised because Sandra Goudie had threatened to walk out of the National Party caucus if he did not pull his head in over that attack on a good school in her area. We know that is true. Everybody else in National’s caucus backed Sandra Goudie in telling Bill English to lay off one of the best schools around her electorate—and he has been forced to back down. 
Things will get worse because National has no policy. National members disagree on policy. Mr Key disagrees with Don Brash on almost everything these days. Have members noticed that very subtle disagreement all the time as Mr Key positions himself to take over the leadership? Things will get worse because of the personality differences that are right through the National Party. Mr English cannot stand Maurice Williamson and Maurice Williamson cannot stand Bill English. Can we believe that those people could ever form a Government together? Dr Smith in  
North and South 
 magazine stated that he was “dorked” by his leader. He stated that he was “screwed by the caucus”. He stated—and I quote this carefully Mr Speaker—that he did not “come to Parliament to shag spiders” whatever that means. I absolutely wonder. What does it mean to have that kind of language used by a member of Parliament who is so desperately bitter after being treated so badly by the colleagues whom he now has to somehow serve on the front bench? Things will only get worse for National because we will make them worse. Should the National members think we have finished with them I say we have not started on them.