Catchpole Brent: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Catchpole Brent: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:623;Page:18211] 
BRENT CATCHPOLE (NZ First) 
: 
 As I listened this afternoon to the Prime Minister softening us up for as my colleague Doug Woolerton said pork barrel politics I was woken from my almost slumber by a little bit of surprise. Then I was somewhat flattered to hear what the Prime Minister was saying. I would like to quote from a speech that was made in this House on 29 August 2002. The quote is from my maiden speech and I would like to quote a few lines: “Over the last 10 years an increasing number of young New Zealanders have not come home. Educated in New Zealand at the expense of the taxpayer they are lost to their families and to the economy. Even more importantly the tremendous international experience and skills they have gained are also lost.” I continued: “These young people enter our education system with high expectations they graduate and they leave New Zealand with a large debt burden. We then do nothing to encourage them to return. They are quickly replaced often by people needing support and retraining. That all makes it harder for our talented highly trained and skilled young people to return here to live and work and they are completely overlooked as a potential source to fill job vacancies.” 
I now bring us back to the Prime Minister’s statement to the House today and I quote from that: “We also want better value for money than we have been getting in some areas of further education and training spending.” I quote from the next paragraph: “Net migration is heavily influenced by the flows of New Zealand citizens. Many of the hundreds of thousands currently offshore have skills this country needs.” Is that sounding familiar? “The Minister of Immigration is looking at how to encourage more migration back by expatriates.” “Hello!” I say to the Prime Minister. She has finally woken up and realised that the real Opposition of this Parliament—New Zealand First—does have something to say does have the right answers and does have the policies and best ideas for this country in order to go forward. 
Dail Jones 
: Just a plagiarist. 
BRENT CATCHPOLE 
: It is obvious that this Prime Minister is a plagiarist as my colleague Dail Jones is calling out. She has copied that from my maiden speech. I am flattered. I find that rather well done by the Prime Minister and I forgive her for taking it from my speech because she actually realises that New Zealand First does have policies and ideas that will help this economy. 
The future for this Prime Minister is to ask her other Ministers to listen to the real Opposition New Zealand First and to listen to the real Opposition leader the Rt Hon Winston Peters. We heard him speak this afternoon. Others were calling out and claiming to be the Leader of the Opposition. We heard Winston Peters refer to three factions within the National Party. So the Leader of the Opposition is not Gerry Brownlee it is not Bill English and—did I forget somebody? Oops! It is irrelevant. I am sorry but it does not matter. We all know who the real Leader of the Opposition is. It is the Rt Hon Winston Peters and he showed us that here today in his speech. 
There was one thing that the Prime Minister failed to recognise today one of the most important parts of this economy—the volunteer. Page 2 of the  
New Zealand Herald  
this morning shows a good example of volunteers in this country. It shows the members of the coastguard and sea rescue organisations who go out for hours. There are hundreds of them—a figure of 700 in the Auckland region was noted in the  
New Zealand Herald  
article—who go out in their own time on shifts of 27 hours at times. They eat sleep and live sea rescues because they want to put something back into society and do something for the safety of people on the water in New Zealand. I wind up my speech by saying that this Government needs to look at those volunteers and provide funding particularly for the coastguard and sea rescue.