Peck Mark: General Debate 
Peck Mark: General Debate 
[Volume:620;Page:16112] 
MARK PECK (Labour—Invercargill) 
: 
 I thank my honourable colleague for saying: “Thank God for small mercies!”. I have always regarded myself as being something like that. The junior Government whip interjected on the previous speaker and asked why Sandra Goudie was not on the front bench. It is quite simple really. When we look at that fearless member and the way she does her business on behalf of the people in her electorate we see that she allows Bill English to go around and bad-mouth Cambridge High School and worse she put out a press statement criticising Ngati Maru iwi for holding to ransom the Sylvia Park development in Auckland and almost exclusively after— 
Hon Mark Gosche 
: It’s in my electorate. 
MARK PECK 
: Well she was interfering in the honourable member’s electorate but she was so fearless in putting out that statement that the moment she found out that Dr Brash—[ 
Interruption 
] The member should stop chirping. She is displaying all the intelligence and wit that she displayed this morning at the select committee—and can I say that people have compared her with orange roughy. Well that is not fair because orange roughy has far more brain capacity than the member has. She put out this statement and as soon as she found out that her leader Don Brash is involved in the company connected with the development and that the ACT party president Catherine Judd was involved and handled the public relations for that firm— 
Darren Hughes 
: She went very quiet then. 
MARK PECK 
: She did not go quiet—she withdrew it! She did not have the conviction to stick to the line that she took at the outset and that speaks volumes about that member. She will never be on the front bench because she does not have the ability to stand up and do anything at all on behalf of the people of her electorate. One of the things that is a great delight about announcing one’s retirement is that it gives one the freedom occasionally to tell junior members in this House some of the things they need to learn if they are going to be around here for any period of time. 
I have been given the honour by my party to sum up on our debate. It really goes this way in relation to the National Party—lack of leadership and the riderless horse and I have the poll results and they are fascinating. If we go through them we find that of all the political parties listed in the poll results the only one that is actually dropping in the polls is the National Party. 
 Every other party is either going up or staying the same but the National Party is dropping. There is a danger in that for the National Party because we remember—and Bill Gudgeon will remember this—when Winston Peters took a huge jump in the polls just before the 1999 election. It was like Mount Everest and then just as quickly he took a huge drop. After the Orewa speech we saw a huge jump in the polls for the National Party and guess what the trends now show? They show the drop. There is nothing unusual about that. Anybody who has any rudimentary understanding of anything to do with politics business and so on will know that there are certain cycles. When we have a massive bump in the way that this occurred there is a correction—and the correction in this respect is to say to National members: “Listen you are leaderless you are a riderless horse and you are a one-trick pony.” The only trick that Don Brash has been able to use to get any publicity this time around was the Orewa speech where he attacked Maori. 
He tried it again in Rotorua. It became such an embarrassment that he and Mr Brownlee went to Rotorua just in the last few days to try to fix it. They did not bank on running into a Maori woman who was simply going for a walk with her dog that day on the foreshore. When she heard what Don Brash had to say she cried. She does not see it as an ownership issue. She sees it as a landlord-tenant issue. Her iwi put the pole in the lake to signify their claim on it. They have never denied people their right of access to that particular lake and for Don Brash to say that he would give them money but no ownership of that lake bed was despicable. That is why National is going downwards in the polls—and may it continue to plunge!