Mark Ron: Manukau City Council (Control of Graffiti) Bill — In Committee 
Mark Ron: Manukau City Council (Control of Graffiti) Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:646;Page:15335] 
RON MARK (NZ First) 
: 
 I take on board the comments of the member Chester Borrows and I respect that member’s view. I am looking at the clock now and I see that he has just used 5 minutes of the time when we could have been voting on the bill. We have another 15 minutes to go. We could still vote and we could progress the bill but I cannot agree to that. I say to Mr Borrows that I am sorry but I am not rising in order to eat up time; I am rising to comment on and debate the bill because this is the House of Representatives. This is a democratic Committee of the whole House. Actually this is one of the rare occasions I say to Chester Borrows when we have been able to engage in debate and it has not been controlled by the member’s party in collusion with the Labour Party. If the member wants to broach questions about limiting the debate then I would draw his attention to his party’s refusal to let New Zealand First participate fully in the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee. 
Simon Power 
: Get over it Ron. 
RON MARK 
: “Get over it” the member says. Well I would tell him not to come preaching his piety about debate being unnecessary when his own party stifles debate. 
I want to comment on Te Ururoa Flavell’s comments. I would say to Mr Flavell that I do not disagree with most of what he said in his korero but I have to say that when the member gets to the illustrious heights of being in Government and carrying a ministerial portfolio he will be faced with challenges as to how to spend the money he will be given. He tells me that we should be putting more money into more projects and Dr Pita Sharples says that we need to be addressing the after-school hours activities. 
Dr Pita Sharples does not read a lot of real Pakeha history or the history of this place; he reads the history that is convenient to his argument and his long-term objectives. But if he did read that history then he would know that New Zealand First when it was in coalition Government with National instigated the latchkey policies. We poured tens no hundreds of thousands of dollars—wrong; we poured millions of dollars—into latchkey programmes. What were they designed to do? To create activities for young people after school to catch them in the period between 3 o’clock and 6 o’clock while their parents were still at work. Why did we do that? We did it to address the very issues of which Dr Sharples speaks. 
What Dr Sharples is preaching here is not new. It is being done now it has been done for a decade and we are continuing to do more. My question to the member would be how much more money does he think this country can continue to pour into social programmes that are still not generating the results that he says they will magically bring? There is only a finite amount of money and somewhere there has to be a carrot and a stick. Dr Sharples’ policies are all about carrot carrot and more carrot and if that is not enough he would give young people more carrots and cheesecake as well. 
Dr Pita Sharples 
: Building communities. 
RON MARK 
: Building communities is what we have been doing. When we were in coalition Government with National—with Wyatt Creech who was a great Minister of Education—we forced through those policies. With Labour we have taken other initiatives and we have supported initiatives from the Green Party—from Sue Kedgley—and from other parties that speak the same sort of language as Dr Sharples. 
The trouble is that Dr Sharples needs to get off his high horse and stop thinking that he is the saviour and the great messiah. Other people have come to this House and are doing that work and the member should recognise it. He should recognise it and applaud it. But he should also recognise that we cannot do everything that he is asking for forever so we must do both things. 
I give my pledge to Dr Sharples that New Zealand First will continue to support social programmes designed to bring equality to families and young children. We will do that through having free health care for children and if we can get that up to 12-year-olds then we will. If that releases more money to low-income families for them to be able to educate their children better then we will do that too. We will strive for more equality—[ 
Interruption 
] He does not want to listen now. This is typical academic arrogance at its best. The member turns his head—it is on the TV cameras now. He turns his head to one side and turns a deaf ear just like a 12-year-old child with a graffiti pen in his or her hand. “I don’t want to hear. Whatever! Talk to the hand.” says Dr Sharples. That is what he preaches. That is what he is teaching and that is why this bill must go through. 
But I pledge to Dr Sharples that despite all his protestations other parties—National Labour and New Zealand First—have been doing that work for decades and will continue to do it for decades. We will not run around lambasting people and preaching that we are the great brown saviours of this nation and that we have the only solutions to problems.