Jones Shane: General Debate 
Jones Shane: General Debate 
[Volume:658;Page:7019] 
Hon SHANE JONES (Labour) 
: 
 Kia ora ano tatou. Te Mangai e te Whare tena koe. When will we hear an apology being made to Dr Pita Sharples? Dr Pita Sharples earnestly advanced his cause and that of Maori broadcasting and this Government sought to shame and embarrass him. It made him apologise to the Prime Minister and to National Ministers and it sought to deprecate him in the midst of his own people and what do we hear? Not a single apology. I say this afternoon to all the lawyers acting for the iwi that they should stand their Queen’s Counsel down. It will no longer be necessary to spend the hard-earned cash that the iwi holds to advance their Treaty entitlement to broadcasting rights to show the face of modern Maori in 2009. 
We have seen today one Minister—we do not need Queen’s Counsel to find him; we need search and rescue—Dr Jonathan Coleman. We are expecting a letter of resignation from Dr Jonathan Coleman this afternoon. Not only has he misled his colleagues about the member from Auckland who will enjoy infamy amongst the car owners of South Auckland and the sentient voters of west Auckland but also we have seen potential wrongdoing that could end up in the High Court. It is a very tawdry affair of the misuse of confidential information that was provided in good faith by Maori Television to stakeholder Ministers. 
That information was somehow fed into the process of a competing bid. Writs were to be served this afternoon in the High Court on behalf of iwi and Maori who were going right back to fight the fights they had to have against National members in this House in times gone by. The Prime Minister has come in and essentially sacked Dr Coleman this afternoon and he has done an extraordinary thing: he has closed down Murray McCully. He has shown that Murray McCully who was responsible for this situation can no longer abuse the position and privilege of being a Minister. Not only did he seek to humiliate the Maori Party—and I am glad for the sake of Maori Party members because they do enough embarrassing things to themselves—but also he has sought to erode to undermine the commercial interests and to ruin the brand of Maori Television. 
Maori Television is an institution that members on this side of the House gladly supported. It has tried to find a way to show the full personality of what it means to be a Kiwi in Aotearoa. Maori Television followed a process only to find that it was being undermined by Ministers and members on that side of the House. So Dr Sharples had no reason to apologise and we did not like to see him apologising and embarrassing himself in front of his senior Pakeha colleagues because it reminded us too much of that historic relationship between Kiwi and iwi—that Kiwis would triumph à la through the senior Ministers. But what a shambles it is. It was almost as if if it was a Maori Minister spending public money there would be a hue and cry but if it was Dr Jonathan Coleman then who cares? 
This is a historic day. Not only has good sense prevailed but also High Court writs did not need to be served. It remains to be seen whether those guns will be fired but this is a very very dark day for the Government and its tawdry treatment of our colleagues in the Maori Party. Admittedly the process was slightly awry but that paled into insignificance compared with the way in which public money was used fast and loose by the Minister of Broadcasting and most important by the Minister for the Rugby World Cup. It just shows New Zealanders that not only was one arm of the Government competing and bidding with another arm in the process but also the process was enriching the administrators of the Rugby World Cup. Not one cent would have gone back to garden-variety Kiwis—not one cent. 
The Minister responsible for this situation is gone; he is gone. I am not entirely sure whether it is a chance for Mr Foss or someone else to emerge but I ask whether we have ever seen the gutting of a Minister in such a short period of time. He was swaggering on national television last night boasting that he had found the money and he was sat down by Mr English in embarrassment.