Mallard Trevor: General Debate 
Mallard Trevor: General Debate 
[Volume:648;Page:17125] 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Minister for the Environment) 
: 
 The “member for Telecom” has just become the “member for the road transport industry”. It is a very interesting transition. For most of his speech he was reading out one of the industry’s press statements. I think that shows how little original thought occurs in the National Party and how little the National members are prepared to say. 
I want to focus on the issue of the day and that is the Merrill Lynch secret report into National Party policy. I want to say that things are consistent. National members are not being inconsistent. They are taking the approach of deliberately keeping details of policy out of announcements and they have been consistent about doing that. Both my colleague Phil Goff and Maryan Street will be talking about the substance of the issue but I want to talk about the ethics of the issue. 
I want to know why John Key when he was in Sydney was talking about selling and leasing back State-owned enterprise assets. Why did he brief Merrill Lynch on that? John Key is a shareholder in Merrill Lynch. He is someone who has worked for Merrill Lynch. I want to know why it is appropriate for someone who is a shareholder in an organisation to give a briefing to that organisation—not even in New Zealand but in Sydney—and to say something he is not prepared to say in New Zealand. I just think that is wrong. I think it shows a tremendous lack of judgment on the part of someone who aspires to be the Prime Minister of New Zealand. I just do not understand how he could do that. 
I vaguely agree with Pansy Wong. In the House today Pansy Wong said it is no secret. She confirmed the National Party policy in this area. It is like the policy that the National Party is going to cut superannuation. Everyone knows that the National Party plans to cut superannuation or to put the age of eligibility up. Everyone knows that it plans not to sell the State-owned enterprises but to sell and lease back the assets. John Key has been involved in discussions on that. It is what we call an open secret. National’s plans in relation to accident compensation are an open secret. 
But the question I have is why when National was making an announcement it made it to a small group of mates in Australia who then did a report that shows very very carefully how they are going to make money from it and that advises a wider circle of mates how to make money out of it—it is just wrong. I think if someone did that in Zimbabwe we would call the person corrupt. We will not do that here because it is an inappropriate thing to do in this Parliament. But it reminds me more of politics in the United States where people are beholden to little groups of funders or to bigger groups of funders for large amounts of money and they make policy decisions on the basis of that and they make inappropriate commitments on the basis of that sort of approach. It is the sort of thing that we just do not do in New Zealand. We think it is wrong. We think people should be open about their policies. 
If there was one thing that was learnt from the period of the 1980s and the 1990s in New Zealand—and I had thought it was learnt by both sides of the House—it was that one did not promise one thing and do something else. This is a very very clear example of an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the vast majority of New Zealanders. It is a clear example of an attempt to hike up the costs and to transfer to private owners the profit of the accident compensation system. That system has generally worked very well for New Zealand. A previous attempt to privatise it was an absolute failure. 
I just go back to something that is not the key substance of the issue but is a question of the ethics of the method of announcement and the approach that was taken. New Zealanders will in the end if something is hard and we tell them it is hard—if we tell them the truth—back us. Why did John Key not take that approach?