Peachey Allan: Appropriation (2008/09 Estimates) Bill — Third Reading Imprest Supply Debate 
Peachey Allan: Appropriation (2008/09 Estimates) Bill — Third Reading Imprest Supply Debate 
[Volume:649;Page:17824] 
ALLAN PEACHEY (National—Tamaki) 
: 
 It will not be lost on the people of New Zealand who are listening in tonight and who are watching on television that we are debating the Appropriation (2008/09 Estimates) Bill. This evening the people of New Zealand have heard three Cabinet Ministers of the current Government and one former Cabinet Minister of the current Government stand up in the House and not defend their party’s policies or public spending plans and show no respect at all for the taxpayers of New Zealand because every dollar in this bill is taken from another hard-working New Zealander who could better spend it than the Government can. All we have had from Mr Cosgrove Mr Jones less so Mr Swain but certainly from Mr Mallard is a string of vituperation. We have heard bitter poisonous sour vituperation aimed at this side of the House and I have sat here during the debate asking myself why. 
I will tell this House and the people of New Zealand why. It is because the Government which has been in office all but 9 years has finally come to the realisation that it will be leaving New Zealand in a far worse condition than it found it in 1999 and it has come to the realisation that it has been strangled by Labour’s own failed ideology. It is incumbent on this House—and I call on the minor parties—to vote this Appropriation Bill down to take away from the Government its legal authority to spend taxpayers’ money. Let us go to an election now. That is what the New Zealand people want. They do not want to see more taxpayers’ money being wasted by that profligate crowd on the other side of the House. So let us do it. Let us vote this bill down and go straight to a general election. 
I was very interested to listen to Mr Mallard talking about under-promising and over-delivering. When he said that did he mean that after 9 long years of he and others being in Cabinet New Zealand has squandered the best terms of trade it has had in a quarter-century? Is that what he meant by saying the Government under-promised and over-delivered? Let us look at interest rates. Under-promised and over-delivered. Interest rates are higher now than they have been for many many years. It is harder now for a young family to get their first home than it has been in 50 or 60 years. Is that what Mr Mallard calls under-promising and over-delivering? Unemployment is on the rise. 
Darien Fenton 
: It is not. 
ALLAN PEACHEY 
: It is now official; New Zealand is in a recession. Is that what those Ministers opposite mean when they talk about under-promising and over-delivering? 
The very least the people of New Zealand could have expected from this House tonight and from that Government is an open wide-ranging debate on the Government’s policies and the alternative policies that other parties in this House have to offer. But no we got policy from just one side. We heard very fine speeches from this side of the House. All we heard from the Government as I have said before and will repeat again was bitter personal poisonous vituperation. If the best that Mr Shane Jones can do is throw personal insults across the floor of this House at people like myself then I am happy to let the electorate the people listening in and watching to form their own judgment and ask themselves whether they want people of that type of character in control of taxpayers’ money. 
When I spoke in the Committee stage I put three questions to the Minister of Education. I invited him to agree with me on three points. I invited him to agree with me that it is wrong that we have some of the least fortunate children in this country on waiting lists for special schools; being on that waiting list means waiting for another parent’s child to pass away. I asked him to agree with me that it is wrong that parents go round on a merry-go-round looking for a school to accept their child. I asked him to agree with me that it is wrong that children with special needs are too often being told to stay home from school. He chose not to do that. He chose instead—no doubt learning from his Cabinet colleagues on the other side tonight or maybe they learnt from him—to get into a belittling personality-based response. Millions and millions of dollars are being spent every year by the Government supposedly on the education of our children. 
Let us leave aside special education for a moment and look more broadly. One of the most significant far-reaching policies that will be introduced by the next National Government is national standards in reading writing and mathematics. We have to end this cycle of the failure of a quarter of our children to learn. I wonder whether that is what Mr Mallard meant when he talked about under-promising and over-delivering because this Government is certainly over-delivering on the failure of our children in our schools. 
The point about national standards is that it is not about testing. A lot of testing goes on in schools at the moment. The problem is that the Government says: “Tick the box that you have tested and you have done your job.” whereas National members when we get into Government will look at education policy in New Zealand and at what we do with the information we have gathered to ensure that a greater percentage of our children are actually learning. That is the key to national standards. That is the significance of the great step forward the New Zealand schooling system will be led towards by the National Government that will shortly be elected to office. 
I come back in my remaining moments to where I started. [ 
Interruption 
] The Minister of Finance can rabbit away as much as he likes but the fact is that he will very very soon be a former Minister of Finance because the people out there understand that this House this week has the opportunity to vote down this Appropriation Bill and take the country to an immediate general election.