Woods Megan: General DebateText is subject to correctionWoods Megan: General Debate[Sitting date: 29 April 2015. Volume:704;Page:2977. Text is subject to correction.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram):Clearly the order has gone out: “Talk about anything but “ponytail-gate. Tell them they’re not allowed to talk about it. Tell them that it’s wrong and to concentrate on anything else at all.” We heard from Amy Adams a former Minister for the Environment who finally discovered recycling today. She pulled it out of the bin that she probably put it in 2 years ago and went on in a desperate effort to fill 5 minutes. It was better than her colleague Hekia Parata tried to do at a million miles an hour.This is a Government that is out of touch and a Government that is rattled. It is a Government that is stumbling from one disaster to the next and it seems the longer that time goes on the weirder and creepier it gets. It is like Peter Pan’s lost boys and girls have gone down the rabbit hole and found some very strange mushrooms on the way down. And when they get there they are led by their very own boy who cannot grow up “Peter Pan John Key”. John Key—let me try this alliteration—the perpetual pre-pubescent ponytail-puller who is leading from the front.So picture this. It is 1972. An 11-year-old John Key sets off to school. He arrives and stares wistfully at the sign overhead—ah Aorangi primary school. A keen observer would see a self-satisfied—some would say smug—look on the young John Key’s face. He thinks to himself: “One day I’ll close this school.” He is joined at the gate by his close buddy Ian Fletcher. He is a lad that seems to have his finger on the pulse. He seems to know what is happening all around the schoolyard. What is better he keeps John Key informed. John decides he would like everyone in the class to know what is going on so he slips his mate Cam a note taking careful note to change his hat before he gives Cam the piece of paper and deciding to himself that if asked he will say that he was just replying to Cam and that he did not start it; Cam did. Just as he passes his note to Cam he sees one of his former besties Judy sitting up there on the back steps and crying all over her spilt milk.Then the sun comes out and it is sparkling. It is a frosty Canterbury morning and a classmate with long flowing glistening locks saunters by. Fetchingly those locks are caught in a ponytail. She walks past. He cannot contain himself. He reaches out and he touches that ponytail. She asks him to stop. He pulls it again he does not care. He is John Key and he can do what he likes. After all he is just horsing about and his mate Steve had told him it was pretty acceptable to touch someone’s hair when they had asked you not to so he does not think he will stop. In fact he goes on to do it eight times despite being asked to stop.This behaviour is cringeworthy enough in an 11-year-old boy but we are talking about the behaviour of the Prime Minister of New Zealand. This is a standard of behaviour that is not acceptable from the Prime Minister. It is a standard of behaviour that is not acceptable for any adult human being. Doing whatever you like with no regard for how it impacts other people is not the standard that we hold ourselves to on this side of the House. You could not make this stuff we are talking about up. What we are seeing from our Prime Minister is better than Malcolm Tucker’s best serve.But on a serious note this is a Government that has absolutely no scruples when it comes to deciding how it is going to tackle a housing crisis. We still have people unable to afford housing we still have unemployment at 5.7 percent and we also have a Government that thinks it is better to spend money on election bribes than on core services such as health and education. But it is OK because the Prime Minister is just horsing around. We want the Prime Minister to step up and get off his high horse.