Key John: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeKey John: General Debate[Sitting date: 22 August 2007. Volume:641;Page:11355. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JOHN KEY (Leader of the Opposition): I moveThat the House take note of miscellaneous business. Well it really has been a bad week for the Government has it not? What a shocker! It is only Wednesday and it has been a bad week for the Government and I say that it will take more than all the formaldehyde in China to preserve that Government beyond 2008.One did not have to read about it in theDominion Post but as it turns out I did. I thought the front page was quite interesting: “Labour support crumbling”. The interesting bit in the story was from Michael Cullen who said: “I don’t comment too much on polls” and he believed that John Key’s honeymoon was over. Well if it is over when I am 20 percent ahead that is quite an interesting observation really is it not!It has been a bad week for a Government that has forgotten who put it in office. The Government does not care about the people of New Zealand any more. Last week when the financial markets were in crisis the Minister of Finance did not even know that the banks in New Zealand were having meetings to try to prop up liquidity. He did not know—which was my guess—that Nathans Finance was going to fall over on Monday because that Government is so out of touch with New Zealand. The Government is so out of touch with New Zealand and everyday New Zealanders that it does not care about the big issues any more. It is prepared to trade 10 years of a relationship with Australia over a simple attack job here domestically on me. The Government thinks that that is more important. It is no wonder that New Zealanders are looking at the Government and saying: “We don’t want them any more.” Because when one starts being prepared to trade one’s relationship then it tells one that things are going terribly wrong.The other thing that is going terribly wrong is the right of New Zealanders who want to have a chance to stand up and say what they think about politics in New Zealand. I tell members that the Labour members may not know much about the Electoral Finance Bill but they know more than Mark Burton the Minister who is actually running it does. My colleague Bill English has been asking Mark Burton questions and Mr Burton cannot answer any of them. It has got so bad that Bill English now has to give 24 hours’ notice so Mark Burton can scurry back to his office and try to get an answer.When we asked Helen Clark today what role she had played in this she thought that was a silly question and did not want to answer it because she knows that that bill will not last. New Zealanders are not going to support an assault on their democracy such as we are seeing from Labour. I am not surprised that Labour members are silent because they know that it is wrong. They know that New Zealanders are entitled to have their say and that that bill will stop them having their say. They will become second-class citizens with that legislation which does not even deserve to be called a bill.I will make this prediction: Mark Burton will be gone before that bill has gone but both of them are going pretty soon. That is what we know. Judith Tizard and Rick Barker will also be gone—actually anybody in the Labour Government with a name starting with a “B” is gone—Benson-Pope Barker and Burton are gone and quite a few others are going as well. They deserve to go if they are going to treat New Zealanders with disrespect.Earlier on this year my colleague Bill English made it quite clear that the National Party was prepared to be in consultation about electoral law reform. That is the way it happens. We do not have an Upper House in this country and we do not have a written constitution. New Zealanders rely on electoral law that is passed not with the intention of keeping the ruling party in power not with the intention of screwing the scrum and not with the intention of being the only bastion that will stop them from electoral oblivion. The reason we have electoral reform on a bipartisan basis is that we rely on that basis to pass good legislation. What is the intent of this legislation? It is to get the Exclusive Brethren and anybody else who wants to speak out against Labour and they did not consult us.Quite interestingly they did not consult the Māori Party or ACT either. On Saturday morning anybody watchingAgenda would have seen Guyon Espiner say that Helen Clark counts the Māori Party on her side of the ledger. So they are good enough to havemaybe in a future Government with Labour but they are not good enough to consult on this legislation!