Little Andrew: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLittle Andrew: General Debate[Sitting date: 06 May 2015. Volume:705;Page:3252. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ANDREW LITTLE (Leader of the Opposition):Well what we have now is the dying months of a shabby grubby National Government. Oh yes that last speech by Louise Upston was one of the biggest statements of conceit that we have had from a junior Minister in this Government for a long long time.Jami-Lee Ross: Says the guy who only gets 11 percent.ANDREW LITTLE: There are none so blind as those who will not see as Mr Jami-Lee Ross well knows. Ms Upston talked about the job fairs. Well I tell you what the job fairs were wonderful for the Melbourne business community especially the taxi drivers because they profited to the tune of nearly $1300 from one Minister alone ferrying himself around with the Melbourne taxis at the expense of the New Zealand taxpayer. That was his contribution to the job fair for New Zealand in Melbourne.What we are observing now—and we can smell it from here—is the rancid smell of the decay of this Government now starting to rise and now starting to bubble up. Let us just have a look at it. It is a Government overtaken by arrogance by contempt and now by conceit. Look at the issues: contempt for conflicts of interest in ministerial portfolios a failure of economic management of gross proportions—and I am going to come back to these in a minute—boondoggle and pork barrel in Northland and they cannot even get that right. They put it all up there and could not get themselves elected. There is out of control spending and abject denial of issues that are screaming out for attention—house prices in Auckland would be one of them. What we have now is no longer a Government; we have a dog and pony show. Oh yes you knew that was going to come up. We have got the show-pony leader who is now more “pony puller”—he is the ponytail puller from Parnell—and a Government that has lost its way and no longer knows what to do as if it ever did.Let us have a look at this. We expect from our Cabinet Ministers the highest standards of conduct. We do not expect Ministers to be flippant and cavalier about conflicts of interest. This Government never gets it right. It thinks “Our people are nice. They’re good people. How can they possibly do anything wrong?”. That is not the issue when it comes to conflicts of interest. The issue about conflicts of interest no matter who the Minister is—whether it is the Prime Minister or anybody else—is the integrity of that public office. The public is entitled to know that our Ministers—who occupy the highest and most senior offices in the land—conduct themselves with the utmost integrity and that when there is a risk or a potential or real conflict of interest they step aside. They should not have to be asked. They should not have to be browbeaten from office before this happens. I am confident that when the full facts of various situations concerning this Government over the last few months emerge the New Zealand public will be horrified. They will be shocked at the increasingly cavalier and contemptuous approach that this Government is taking to that important part of occupying public office.Let us have a look at economic management. This Government will go down in history as one of the most reckless that we have ever had. It has ridden the wave—the complacent wave of high commodity prices—and it has thought “Nothing to do here. This is all going swimmingly for us. We don’t have to worry about the future because we won’t be around long enough to have deal with it.” Well now it is catching up with the Government. Commodity prices have been falling for well over a year now and it knows that the tsunami is about to hit—or the lack of it actually—which is the $7 billion hole that will emerge in this economy later this year when the farmers cannot get the returns on their goods and on their work. It will be a $7 billion hole in our economy. Of course it will be bigger than that because there is a multiplier effect as that money fails to wash through the economy. Then there will be less work less income and less revenue for many more businesses and for many more working people. That is what is going to hit New Zealand in the latter part of this year and this Government could not care less. That is why the Government members are all looking down now because they do not really care about that stuff.Alastair Scott: 3.5 percent growth. 80000 new jobs. What else do you need to know?ANDREW LITTLE: They have ridden the wave of the benefits of it and they do not care about it. They bury their heads in the sand like the member opposite—bury their heads in the sand—because they just do not care. They sit by and say “This is the sign of success: a rapidly out of control Auckland housing market.” This is their sign of success. They do not care that innocent Aucklanders—young working families—are being shut out of the housing market. They never cared about that. They lost the basic New Zealand egalitarian ethos long ago—they never cared about it never will. This is a shabby grubby Government with no vision that is on its way out.