King Annette: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeKing Annette: General Debate[Sitting date: 10 October 2007. Volume:642;Page:12226. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon ANNETTE KING (Minister of State Services): I just want New Zealanders to know—the ones watching on Sky channel 94—that John Key who has just criticised the Prime Minister for making overseas trips that bring New Zealand credit is just about to leave on a 2-week European junket. It was to be rugby rugby rugby and wining and dining. The Rugby World Cup quarter-final result means he now has a pretty empty diary indeed.After a disastrous series of leadership changes the National Party believes it has finally found the man. National members have seen off Mr Bolger they have seen offMrs Shipley they have seen off Mr English and Dr Brash and now they have put all their political eggs in the Key basket. Mr Key is the new face of the National Party. He swept in announcing the abandonment of long-held National policies and principles and he quickly adopted Labour ones. He adopted many Labour policies to the extent that commentators are increasingly calling him “Mr Labour-lite”. “Mr Labour-lite” is what they are calling him now.With a series of nice photo opportunities Mr Key has deliberately positioned himself and the National Party as the answer to all New Zealand’s problems. Well if that is the answer we would have to ask ourselves what the question was. Of course there has never been any detail about National’s policies; there has been no detail about what those members would do. There has been lots of puffery and lots of promises but increasingly this side of the House the media and political commentators have put the squeeze on the National Party saying: “Give us some policy detail. Don’t give us carbon copies of Labour’s policy or New Zealand First’s policy. Give us some of your own policy. Give us your own thought your own words your own proposed action.”Well the National Party decided in the last 2 weeks that it was a great time to release a little bit of policy. After all Parliament was not sitting and National members thought they would not have to have too much scrutiny. The Prime Minister was overseas representing her country and the country was following the All Blacks so it was time for National to drop a few policy hints and hope that people would not notice them—but it would satisfy the critics who had been asking for a while.What those members did not reckon on was that they were not going to drop some policy hints; they were going to drop some policy clangers—and did they ever drop some policy clangers! There was a series of them. It started with Bill English onAgenda. He is the man who is supposed to know what the New Zealand public are feeling. He believes he has his finger on the pulse. So he announced to the people of New Zealand that he would like to sell off some of mum and dad’s silver—some of our State-owned assets. He thinks the public are thirsting to see their State-owned assets sold off yet again. What he did not reckon on was what the public thought of that and the bow wave of that has washed right over him and Mr Key. The public do not like it. They will not entertain it. I make this prediction: by the time of the election the sale of State-owned assets will be off the National Party’s agenda and its policy will be the same as the Labour Party’s.The next thing was Mr Key’s blunder his clanger on foreign policy. He said: “The war is over.” and then he tried to cover up by saying that he did not really mean that but was talking about something else. He has been caught out for misleading and it is up there on the website for every New Zealander to see. I say that New Zealanders should go and look at it. If they want to see a man who is trying to mislead them then they should just read that transcript. He said the war was over. But he forgot to make the phone call to Mr Bush—he did not know it was over—and he forgot to make the phone call to the Iraqi Government. They did not know it was over.Then Mr Key spoke about the privatisation of schools. That was clanger No. 3. [Interruption] Members opposite are enjoying this very much I can tell. National wants to privatise our schools. It wants to build them and the private sector to own them. That was something Katherine Rich did not know about; she has more integrity than that. She was not told about the policy—it was National’s social welfare policy all over again. But the doozy of them all has to be the bumbled announcement that National would take the cap off general practitioners’ fees. That will go down as the biggest blunder it has made.