English Bill: Address in Reply 
English Bill: Address in Reply 
[Volume:628;Page:317] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 I was going to talk about education in the Address in Reply debate particularly when I heard Steve Maharey say that he wanted to be associated with excellence. Well putting Steve Maharey in charge of excellence and education is like putting David Benson-Pope in charge of victim support. But as my colleague says he is—and it is actually just as likely. Steve Maharey’s record in education is one of wreckage chaos and mess. The Government feels so badly about what Steve Maharey did in tertiary education that it has put Dr Cullen in charge of that and it has given him 3 years to fix it. He will need every day of the rest of the life of this Government to make any headway at all. 
As I said I was going to talk about that but the mess the Government has got itself into over its arrangement with New Zealand First and Winston Peters is so bad that it cannot go without comment after question time today. We have tried in this House to get the Government to establish the rules on which Winston Peters is operating. What role does he have in being part of the Government as a Minister but outside the Government as the leader of the New Zealand First Party? 
We have had to ask those questions in the House because the  
Cabinet Manual 
 is now no longer of any value. In fact the Prime Minister Helen Clark has effectively suspended the  
Cabinet Manual 
. The  
Cabinet Manual 
 that currently exists is not relevant; we have been told that by the Prime Minister herself. But there is no new manual. Even if the current one is meant to have some kind of currency what action will the Prime Minister take against Phil Goff who certainly breached the conventions of collective responsibility by undermining New Zealand’s Minister of Foreign Affairs overseas. That is the Minister who leaked to the media the fact that he was having backroom conversations with the Foreign Minister of another country about our Minister of Foreign Affairs. He did that to humiliate Mr Peters. So we have looked at the  
Cabinet Manual 
 and decided that it has no currency; it is irrelevant. 
We have asked questions in the House and have had no answers to them. I tell Helen Clark that that is holding the House in contempt. The main function of this House apart from its representative capacity is to hold the executive to account. We cannot hold that Prime Minister or her Government to account because she cannot tell us what responsibilities the Government has. 
The Prime Minister should come to the House and lay those responsibilities out but she has not done that. Instead she had a go at doing that at a press conference yesterday. She did not think it was worth telling Parliament; she thought she would tell the  
New Zealand Herald 
—no doubt to curry favour with it after the protracted rows she has had with it over the years. Let us look at what she told the  
New Zealand Herald 
. She was asked how Mr Peters would handle issues such as defence and trade when he had different views from the Government—because he certainly has. She just said: “… you may find that he’s saying a good deal less on those issues …”. So that is the answer: Helen Clark has told Winston Peters to say nothing about the issues on which he disagrees with the Government. 
Dr the Hon Lockwood Smith 
: He’s going to meet the Defence Minister. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: He is going to meet the Defence Minister but we will come to that. First she said that Mr Peters would say a good deal less. Then she said that she did not believe there would be confusion in other countries about discrepancies between Mr Peters and the Government on defence or trade. There would be no confusion about the discrepancies because in that situation he was bound by collective responsibility in his capacity as Minister of Foreign Affairs. 
What does that mean? We now have a new definition of what the Minister of Foreign Affairs does. The agreement with the Government does not say anything about Mr Peters being bound on trade and defence as part of his responsibility as Minister of Foreign Affairs. It actually says the opposite. The Prime Minister is saying to the press that he is bound by collective responsibility on defence and trade; the agreement she signed just a few weeks ago states exactly the opposite. It states that he is not bound on anything outside his responsibilities as the Minister of Foreign Affairs. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: So what’s going on? Unbelievable! 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Well members should listen to this explanation: “I don’t think we should try to make the situation more complex than it needs to be.” 
Gerry Brownlee 
: Who said that? 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Ms Clark. Of course she does not want to make it more complex than she Winston Peters and Phil Goff have made it. We can have all this political toing and froing in here—and we will for as long as this Government lasts. It will be an issue because Helen Clark cannot and will not resolve it. But I tell members that what really bothers me is how stupid we look to other countries and how stupid we look to the Australians who think that this Government is away with the fairies anyway. 
However Winston Peters is over there representing all of us because we treat foreign affairs largely as a bipartisan issue. On issues that matter on serious issues of serious national interest such as whether we send more troops to Afghanistan we take a bipartisan approach. So Winston Peters is representing not just New Zealand First—he certainly does not represent the Labour Party because he does not want to—but he is representing the New Zealand Parliament and people. 
But what happened when he went to Australia to represent us? Labour humiliated him. It humiliated New Zealand’s Minister of Foreign Affairs at APEC. It has humiliated him again today. He is going off to have a meeting with a senior UK Minister the Minister of State for the Armed Forces but Helen Clark came out this morning to set out the Government’s position on Afghanistan before Mr Peters arrives at the meeting just to make sure that no matter what he says there no one will take any notice of it. So Winston Peters is someone who has gone into an agreement with the Government and the Government has decided that the best way to treat him is to humiliate him. 
Gerry Brownlee 
: He loves it. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Some of us would say that he deserves it—whether or not he loves it. Some would say he is behaving in a stupid manner himself. The photo from APEC of New Zealand’s Minister of Foreign Affairs trying to stand aside from the rest of the Asia-Pacific region—as if anyone noticed for God’s sake!—was just ridiculous and it brought shame on our country. 
National members want Helen Clark to lay out the rules and through Parliament to express what responsibility Winston Peters has. We want her to tell Phil Goff to stop undermining the Minister of Foreign Affairs because we believe that it is bad for New Zealand and we believe that she should stop saying stupid and contradictory things to the press about what her Government is up to. The Prime Minister has been through all this before. Can members of Parliament remember when Jim Anderton was the leader of one party in the House and the leader of a different party outside the House? Do members remember how corrosive that was and how stupid it looked? 
Helen Clark has decided that being Prime Minister is so important to her that she has to override all those conventions that make our constitution work. She has suspended the  
Cabinet Manual 
. There are now no rules for Cabinet Ministers. She cannot explain them herself in response to simple and intelligent questions from the media. 
And she has now decided to downgrade our Minister of Foreign Affairs to the point where he receives no respect. The  
New Zealand Herald  
referred to him as a “postbox”. Well at least that indicated some kind of specific role. Helen Clark has not described Mr Peters as an influential and senior Minister or as a spokesperson for the Government; she has described him as “a point of contact”. New Zealand’s Minister of Foreign Affairs is now a point of contact and that is all. We know Mr Peters and we know him well so I ask him whether he will take that humiliation.