Donnelly Brian: General Debates 
Donnelly Brian: General Debates 
[Volume:607;Page:4979] 
Hon BRIAN DONNELLY (NZ First) 
: 
 My colleague Peter Brown is promoting the Death with Dignity Bill. Members will know that but I just want to make sure that they also know about a significant provision in that bill that means that even if the bill is passed by this House it will not become law until it is agreed to by a majority of New Zealanders through a referendum. In a sense that reflects New Zealand First’s belief in the power of the people. But I do not want to talk about Mr Brown’s bill today because after the leadership fiasco of last week I have concluded that what this House should be debating or passing is a “Death with Dignity For Once-great Political Parties Bill”. 
The events over the last week have demonstrated conclusively that National is in its death throes. As a party it has a terminal illness and it is sad to watch it going through the agonies of its certain demise. That is sad because National is a party with a proud heritage that stretches all the way back to 1890 to the first-ever political party in this country the Liberal Party. That party brought in world-leading legislation for political and social justice and in the field of industrial relations. National is also directly descended from the Reform Party which set the framework that ensured that agriculture would be the economic backbone of this country—that is also in National’s bloodline. Under its present name National presided over the glory days of the 1950s and 1960s when full employment was not only the norm but the expectation. 
National is now like a ringbarked totara withering inexorably towards its inevitable demise. The first peal of the death knell was publicly heard in the early 1990s when National refused to listen to the warnings of its own caucus member Winston Peters. He issued a warning that National was turning its back on its heritage and rejecting its inherent values and that breaking the promises it had made to people at the time of the election in order to look after rich kids and to save their backsides was not a principle of the old National Party. 
But National rejected those warnings and it ejected the only member of its caucus who was prepared to fight for the principles and values of the old National Party. That member was a man who would not sell his soul for the trappings of power. And so it was that New Zealand First was born to fill the vacuum in the political spectrum that had been created by National. The very name of the National Party is a misnomer. It is New Zealand First that believes that policy positions should be first and foremost in the national interest. National should rename itself the “International Party”; it is not a national party because national interests are no longer its first concern. 
There is only one magic elixir that National could use to save itself and that would be to go down on bended knee to Winston Peters say it is sorry admit he was right and National got it wrong and ask him to please come back and lead it to the promised land. But National will not do that because of inflated egos and deflated capabilities. National is dying because the blood of Ruth Richardson is still flowing through its veins. We all know that what flowed through Ruth Richardson’s veins was largely made up of ice particles and it is the ice that is still flowing through the veins and arteries of National that is killing it. 
New Zealand First believes in free enterprise; free enterprise is the economic driver of the nation. However it is free enterprise with a social conscience that we believe in. National once believed in that. But like the pigs in  
Animal Farm 
 it allowed the bit about the social conscience to be conveniently deleted. New Zealand First believes in the efficacy of the market in its right place but does not believe that market mechanisms can be used to deliver social objectives. New Zealand First believes in a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay. It looks to a replication of the previous legislation on that—the repealed Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act. New Zealand First believes in education as an investment in the future of this country not as a commodity and it believes that the quantity and nature of that investment should be determined by the outcomes not by the vested interests of the lobby groups which I must admit that the present Labour Government is more concerned about. But New Zealand first is concerned with the quality of that investment.