Barker Rick: General Debates 
Barker Rick: General Debates 
[Volume:613;Page:9965] 
Hon RICK BARKER (Minister for Courts) 
: 
 The divide between this side of the House and the Tory side of the House in Opposition could not be bigger if we tried. I do not think I have seen quite such a huge gap. 
I want to draw the attention of the House to a very insightful piece that appeared in the  
New Zealand Herald 
 recently. Peter McCardle a former Tory MP then a New Zealand First MP and now the head of the ACT research unit who tells 
his political masters what they want to hear said: “… I do suspect most of the secretaries spend a lot of time filing their nails and reading the Woman’s Weekly but this is only to be expected isn’t it?” That epitomises the arrogance of the so-called ruling class—the born to rule. It epitomises members of that class; they have such a dismal and mean-spirited view of ordinary New Zealanders. They are people with celluloid souls. They are churlish and anti-worker. 
It was also very insightful to learn that Mr Stephen Franks had asked how people would describe an ACT person. I will help Mr Franks and ACT. I would describe ACT members as self-absorbed self-centred self-regarding self-seeking self-serving self-righteous smug and arrogant. 
They are little different from the new leader of the National Party Don Brash. Don Brash is anti-worker anti-person and anti-everything that the Labour Party stands for. He has such a dismal mean view of New Zealanders and is so removed from them that he said he wants people to line up for the dole at 8 a.m. outside a post office. I tell Mr Brash that post offices have gone. 
Even though he made that mistake—which he has readily acknowledged—he has now said he will attack people’s holidays. I am really proud to be part of a Labour Government that says ordinary working New Zealanders should get 4 weeks’ annual leave. These are the people who have built New Zealand. These are the people who go to work to type letters for that pompous stuffed up arrogant person Mr Peter McCardle. They also go home look after their kids feed their families and do all those other things that we expect them to do. These are the people who look after the next generation and they are helping to create the next generation—which Mr McCardle thinks so dismally of. These are the people who turn up every day at the freezing works and cut thousands of throats and render down thousands of stomachs. These are the people who do all the hard work in this country and without them this country would have nothing. Without these hard-working New Zealanders Mr Peter McCardle and his like would be simply pieces of trash blowing in the wind. 
These hard-working New Zealanders deserve a decent holiday. Labour will provide them with 4 weeks’ holiday. Don Brash said he would take it off them. Mr Brash wants a holiday: he wants every worker’s holiday! But he wants more than that. He wants to cut minimum pay rates so that wages fall as low as he thinks they should do. He wants to cut benefits to put lifetime limits on benefits. He wants to push up the time at which people are eligible for superannuation and no doubt cut superannuation. 
He is the same person who like the ACT party members says out of the other side of his mouth that New Zealand has a drain of skills and all our good people are leaving to go overseas. They are doing that because National cut wages and conditions in this country with the Employment Contracts Act. National Party members went to the country and said: “We will not cut penalty rates.” but they did and drove wages down. Thousands of New Zealanders went overseas and worked in Australia. We now have a building boom in New Zealand and we cannot get the resources for it. 
New Zealand would be a dim and dismal place if Don Brash ever got his hands on the Treasury benches. In my view that is impossible. 
The debate having concluded the motion lapsed.