English Bill: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
English Bill: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:606;Page:3267] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Leader of the Opposition) 
: 
 I move  
That this House expresses no confidence in the Labour - United Future minority Government because it has done what it came to do and now lacks vision and purpose because it has outlined a legislative programme which undermines New Zealand’s ability to grow an economy that supports business and high-quality health and education and because the Prime Minister refuses to explain her Government’s policies on the Treaty of Waitangi and the future role it will play in our nation.  
No wonder she did not want to give that speech! What went wrong with her instructions to the whips when she made them get up and clap to a speech that she said was boring and lacking in vision? I do not often agree with the Prime Minister but I did on that occasion. Last year I said that the Prime Minister’s speech about innovation was like a body bag for a good idea. This year she has exhumed the bones and polished them up. There is a simple test for that speech. One would think that a Government that had just been elected would come to the opportunity of a Prime Minister’s statement with some conviction with some purpose and fresh in terms of a larger view of what it was trying to achieve.  
Did that speech ask and answer the big questions for New Zealand? No. It asked one question and that was the question about how to grow this economy in a sustainable way. It did not answer it with any conviction or with credibility. That speech should have asked the following questions: how to close the gap with the average Australian earning over $200 a week more than a New Zealander; how to rescue hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders from dependency; how to build a common understanding of our citizenship; and how to educate our children so that they can fulfil their potential.  
Before I get on to those matters I shall first just make some comments on the upcoming likely Iraqi war. Let us be honest. This is a choice between bad and worse options. Much will be said over the next few weeks and I will just make some brief comments. We have supported as I believe the Government has the US in its efforts to get a UN resolution. At times though it has been unclear just how determined the Government is about that. I think the swings in the Prime Minister’s rhetoric show the need to meet two requirements: on the one hand to try to maintain the friendship she has built up with the US and on the other to keep her own caucus in line. At times she has been realistic—such as today—in making the comment that unless Iraq makes some dramatic move in the direction of disarmament war is likely and calling on Iraq to make that move. I support that. At other times she has been opportunistic. At other times the Prime Minister has sounded more like a commentator than a participant.  
I just want to make this statement as the difficult choices confront us. In the end we should make our own foreign policy. Multilateralism is not an excuse to have our foreign policy made by France and Germany. 
 Secondly I ask that the Government’s stance will take account of our relationships with our traditional allies because they are so precious. That may come to a difficult choice because our traditional allies seem to be lining up on a different side of the argument from the multilateral side.  
Finally we want to see openness and honesty about the policy. I hope we do not go through the charade we went through with the Government’s policy on the SAS in Afghanistan. A frigate is heading to the Gulf. We want to know how it can possibly operate there in a way that will not connect it to the Iraq war.  
This is not a political or partisan point. It is simply a matter in which the New Zealand public has taken great interest. We want to know how that use of New Zealand’s Navy will continue to be regarded as having nothing to do with the Iraq war because on the face of it that seems to defy common sense. I invite the Prime Minister to explain that aspect of her policy over the next week.  
I come back to the economy. One thing that was striking about the speech was that no reference at all was made to the general conditions in which our businesses operate. This Government sees nothing in the economy except through the lens of Government programmes and committees and we have seen more of them. The vast majority of businesses that do not apply for grants that are not in the favoured sectors may as well not exist. They include for instance the agricultural sector of the New Zealand economy the primary production sector and the export sector which gets mentioned only because two export agencies will be merged. That is what will happen.  
Let us look at what has happened to some of the initiatives from last year. Last year four sectors were picked out amongst the blaze of hype. One of them has produced a draft report and that is the  
Path to Sustainable Growth 
. The Prime Minister noted that that draft report has ambitious targets. That speech tells us that the Government has now given up on the ambitious target it set last year. It says that growth has peaked and growth peaked at a rate that takes us not one whit in the direction of moving us up the OECD ladder which is the target set by Helen Clark. So today the Government has given up.  
One other point about the economic bit of that speech is that it showed a fundamental misunderstanding of what has happened in New Zealand in the last 15 years. For the Prime Minister to say that she is not returning to any of the discredited policies of the 1990s simply shows that she does not understand that the open flexible economy the country has of which her Government has enjoyed the benefit as have many other people was built on 15 years of sometimes difficult decisions including ones in which she took a key role. If she does not understand that then she has no concept of what is really required to lift our sustainable growth. What we saw today was another instalment in the public relations strategy. It is not an economic strategy.  
When the Government approaches those issues there is a singular characteristic that we oppose. The key to sustainable growth is innovation: the unpredictable and the uncontrolled entrepreneurism in innovation. Every move this Government makes in respect of business strangles uncontrolled innovation and every policy move it makes is about innovation that bureaucrats like and that the Government can have its photo taken with. That is what happens. There was nothing in the speech about the general conditions of business that will promote the innovation and entrepreneurism that we have. 
The Government made a small flick at welfare. We have had 4 or 5 years of strong employment growth. National will talk about that issue because the Government has decided that that does not matter. Even by the Government’s projections the number of New Zealanders in dependency on welfare benefits will rise to 370000 over the next 3 years. That number will rise. Five years of strong employment growth have barely made a dint in the total number of New Zealanders who are locked into dependency.  
Let us take the invalids benefit and the sickness benefit. Over the next 4 years invalids benefit and sickness benefit beneficiary numbers are projected by this Government to rise not by 5 percent or by 10 percent but by 25 percent. That is a 25 percent increase on the back of the policy package that the Government has outlined today.  
I have come to one conclusion: the Government does not care because the beneficiaries will vote for it. I say that that is wrong. I say that we should—and National does—have a belief in the capacity of every New Zealander to contribute. Systems that pat them on the head and Ministers like Steve Maharey who say “We’re getting on fine we really like you please vote for us.” are betraying hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders and the children of those New Zealanders who are born into that dependency. He laughs. There is no mention of that in the Prime Minister’s statement which is a singular and glaring policy failure.  
I want to move on to the issue of our common citizenship. What we have been seeing in the last few weeks is a most peculiar and I believe unique occurrence in New Zealand politics—a Prime Minister who for reasons she cannot explain will not talk to the New Zealand public about the role of the Treaty of Waitangi. There has not been a Prime Minister who has deserted that obligation of New Zealand leadership in my living memory. 
Hon Roger Sowry 
: She would probably have to talk too early in the morning. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: She is not a morning person so she could not turn up then! That is the level of debate. We had a wonderful service in the beautiful grounds of Waitangi on the morning of Waitangi Day in the meeting house which has carved into its walls the stories of the iwi of New Zealand and the leader of our country said: “I’m not going. I’m not a morning person.” But who did she send? She sent the Hon Chris Carter. She sent the water boy. It was one of those occasions that happens very rarely in public life. 
Hon Annette King 
: Did you sleep in this year? 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Labour members know they will be very embarrassed by what I say but I suggest they listen because there is a sharp lesson in it. Chris Carter summed up in 10 minutes the deep-seated problem between Labour and the Maori it claims to represent. He gave a speech that was arrogant patronising and cringingly politically correct. In doing so— 
Hon Annette King 
: It wasn’t politically correct. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Those members think it was a joke because they were not there. Dover Samuels was there and he made the wise decision not to get up to do what Chris Carter said at the end of his speech which was to sing a nice Maori song. They sang “Pokare Kare Ana” and it was terrible. Dover Samuels would not join them. We will offer the resources to the Prime Minister—[ 
Interruption 
] 
Mr SPEAKER 
: There will be no further interjections during the member’s speech by members of the Labour Party or they will leave the Chamber. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: We will offer to the Prime Minister the resources to mount a national marae tour for Chris Carter because in making his speech he walked all over literally the Kotahitanga flag that had been put on the floor of the meeting house to be respected. He actually walked all over it. Well that is Labour members: pat them on the head keep them nice and quiet and feed them cash patronising them—and it is insulting to see it in the flesh; it is not the New Zealand we want.  
That is why we must talk about this issue. That is why it is not good enough for the Prime Minister to skate around saying that she is not now going to run a Treaty of Waitangi education programme. That is why it is not good enough for her to talk about the treaty in such abstract terms that it is meaningless. There are real issues and we will keep raising them.  
So many New Zealanders are uneasy about the separatist direction in which the Government is taking the role of the Treaty of Waitangi and that uneasiness must be heard. The Prime Minister is the only one who has said that that is divisive. When I went to Ratana and to Waitangi I did not get that response from Maori; what I got from them was some disagreement some of it vigorous and some people saying to me: “Isn’t it good. A Pakeha politician is coming along and doing better than the kind of bland rubbish they serve up every year.” Because if a marae is about anything it is about robust debate as this Parliament should be. The Prime Minister even said that it was culturally inappropriate for me to raise these issues at Ratana.  
Labour’s attitude to Maori is a big part of the problem—of solving this problem—because I have found Maori attitudes pretty open pretty aggressive and pretty robust and one can deal with that. I say to the Prime Minister that to pass by the obligation of a New Zealand Prime Minister to talk about the treaty is an utter dereliction of leadership and it is not enough to say that those who raise it are racist divisive and Maori-bashing. That is easy. The hard bit is to tell the nation what one thinks; to tell it why it will work to progressively separate off aspects of Maori life and culture from the rest of New Zealand.  
So this year we will be advancing our agenda because the Government does not have one. The public will be talking about our issues because the Government does not have any serious ones that it wants the Government to talk about. We will be talking about one standard of citizenship; we will be talking about what is really needed to lift our sustainable rate of growth. We will be talking about the hundreds of thousands of people Labour says it represents but whom it is trapping into dependency actually liking to keep them there and having policies that guarantee more of them by their own measure. We will also be talking about how to educate our children properly.  
Finally it is actually quite hard to run a Government without a sense of purpose. I have been in a Government in which that happened. It gets messy. The management is difficult the people get pretty fractious and it starts feeling like the early years when one is in Opposition. Without a sense of purpose this Government will mire itself in endless minor and some major scandals. It is gradually opening up the credibility gap between what it says about the economy to the business community and what it actually does. It is leaving a huge credibility gap already between what it is doing about the Treaty of Waitangi and what it is willing to say to the public it is doing. I just want to say to the Maori members: as this Government that looks like a three-term Government already lumbers on through the year— 
Rt Hon Helen Clark 
: Ha ha! 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Well it does. She has given only three Prime Minister’s statements and she has had enough of doing it! I believe that the Prime Minister’s qualities as a foreign affairs commentator are admirable and I believe that is where her interests lie. I believe that is really what will drive this Government over the next few years.  
I say to the Maori members that we are willing to engage in discussion and debate even if their own party is not. We are willing to take the future of this country seriously even if their own party is not. We are willing to get down and debate the difficult issues that arise even if their own party is not. That is why I move a vote of no confidence. There is no purpose no direction and no challenge to New Zealanders about the issues that really matter to them.