Moroney Sue: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Moroney Sue: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:629;Page:1175] 
SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 As a new member in this House it has been enlightening to listen to the leadership speeches and the reactions to those speeches. In my own maiden speech I said that I have come here to improve people’s lives. I am really pleased to report that already there has been legislation before this House that does just that. For example we have started to discuss paid parental leave for self-employed people and that will improve people’s lives. It is good practical legislation that will actually make a difference. It will give financial stability for self-employed people when they are about to become parents and it will enable the employment of replacement staff where that is appropriate. But most important it will allow those parents to have that precious time with the precious new person in their lives. 
We have also been discussing legislation to enable the Working for Families package to be brought forward and that will make a real and practical difference for those people who need it. We have also been discussing interest-free student loans and the people from the Opposition side of the House who probably had their education without paying for it at all at taxpayers’ expense— 
Hon Tau Henare 
: Who paid for yours? Oh the union; that’s right. 
SUE MORONEY 
: No I had State-funded education—as it should be—through to high school level thank you very much and I appreciated it. So I therefore vote for interest-free student loans because that removes the barriers for people so that they can improve their knowledge and skills—the knowledge and skills that are so important to the future of New Zealand. The Opposition members do not seem to be able to understand that. 
Already we are on the path to bringing forward the Prime Minister’s three key areas that she spoke of in her speech yesterday: economic transformation for this country looking after families young and old and ensuring that we maintain our unique national identity. New Zealanders know that Labour under Helen Clark will deliver what it sets out to do because we have been able to prove that over the last 6 years. 
I now go on to Dr Brash’s speech. I was looking forward to that speech very much because I was wondering why the National Party is in so much turmoil over a leadership debate. Even I as a new member of Parliament know that that is fatal. It is fatal for a party to be engaging in that sort of debate in this part of the political process. So why is the National Party embroiled in a leadership debate? I was looking for Dr Brash’s speech to give me some clues about that. Well it did. I discovered that not long after Dr Brash started his speech my mind wandered. As an adult educator I knew that that was my very first clue. People’s minds wander when they are not engaged in what they are being told. When the speaker has a lack of content to focus on that is when minds start to wander. 
Where did my mind wander to during that experience? Well it wandered over to the Opposition side of the House. I wondered what would it be like to be a National back-bencher listening to that speech from my leader. Suddenly it dawned on me. I realised why there is a leadership debate going on in the National Party. It was embarrassing. I found that I agreed with Deborah Coddington probably for the first time in my life when she said on Newstalk ZB that Dr Brash does have to get his performance up in the House. She said it was actually quite embarrassing to watch him at work in the House. That was how I felt yesterday when I put myself in the shoes of a National Party back-bencher. 
However it is not the first time that I have felt thankful not to be a back-bencher for the National Party. How embarrassing it must be to have to go out and face the electorate talking about how we need to spend more money on our roads when one’s own party—the National Party—was proposing tax cuts which would give us less money to spend on roads. How it must do a member’s credibility in as a National MP to be talking about how more money needs to be spent on health and how more money needs to go into aged care when knowing all the while that one’s own party was planning tax cuts if the New Zealand public would let it do so. That would mean there would be less money spent in the aged-care area. It would mean that we could not go forward in our health and education areas. And what about the credibility of having to go out as a National Party MP and try to feign some real concern about people on low wages in New Zealand at the very time that one was going around arguing against the increases that Labour has brought in to the minimum wage? How that must undermine one’s credibility. As a National Party MP one would be reduced to talking one’s country down for goodness’ sake! 
It was time to tune back into the speech after my mind had wandered for a little while thinking about what it must be like to be a National Party back-bench MP and how that would feel. When I did tune back into Dr Brash’s speech I wondered whether he lives in the same country that I live in. There he was talking down this country’s progress despite all the evidence to the contrary and despite all the data showing otherwise. I was not sure which country he was actually referring to. Maybe he just went into a time warp—that would be a change from a flip-flop—and was talking about the New Zealand of the 1990s. 
I remember that the 1990s were a dim dark era. I remember the communities that I lived near to such as Cambridge Morrinsville and Matamata hunkering down during the 1990s and trying to hold on to what they had because that was all that communities could do. They could not plan for progress. During the 1990s those rural communities were going backwards and all they could do was to hold on to what they had. Those communities in the 1990s under National were like beaten dogs staying in the corner and not willing to come out unless they were beaten again. 
It took a while under a Labour Government and under progress and growth for those communities to adjust. We are only now getting new housing subdivisions agreed to in those communities because it has taken so long for them to think about planning for growth rather than just hunkering down and asking National not to beat them any more. If one couples those thriving communities in the rural area now with the growth in employment under Labour and the economic growth one can see that growth is getting out to every corner in New Zealand. That is the type of economic recovery that this country has enjoyed. I shudder to think what this House would be considering now if New Zealand voters were not as smart as they are. We would have the prospect of Dr Brash flip-flopping around on the international stage representing us—how embarrassing! Fortunately New Zealand voters are smart. The National Party strategists got it wrong. 
Earlier the Hon Paul Swain was talking about  
Desperate Housewives 
 but I cannot think about the last election campaign without thinking about  
The Simpsons 
. I imagine the debrief about what went wrong for the National Party actually happening in a nuclear power plant in Springfield. In the debrief between Montgomery Burns and his sidekick Smithers they are wondering what went wrong with the National Party campaign. Montgomery Burns is saying to Smithers: “We threw everything at them. We appealed to greed with the tax cuts. We tried to set them against each other with the race card. We even got religious extremists to go out and do our dirty work for us. What went wrong Smithers? What went wrong?”. And Smithers is replying after thinking about it for a while: “Well Mr Burns sir we got it wrong because we thought New Zealand voters thought like Homer Simpson. In fact what we’ve discovered is that they have morals like Marge Simpson.” 
And thank goodness that at that point Dr Brash’s speech finished. My mind stopped wandering because there was some muted clapping going on in a pretence of adoration towards the leader’s great speech. My mind snapped back to the present time and it was like waking up from a bad dream. I had a sense of relief that I was not a National Party back-bencher; I was a Labour back-bencher. And it was like after having a nightmare waking up and thinking: “Thank goodness that was just a bad dream.” The reality is that I am a Labour MP. Thank goodness for that because Labour is growing the economy there is the lowest unemployment in the Western World and we are investing in health education and policing. We are promoting our culture and identity we are protecting our environment and we are maintaining our nuclear-free stance and status and our principled foreign policy. Thank goodness that I am a back-bencher for the Labour Party.