Hughes Darren: General Debates 
Hughes Darren: General Debates 
[Volume:609;Page:6358] 
DARREN HUGHES (NZ Labour—Otaki) 
: 
 This has been a particularly interesting Wednesday general debate in the House. It started off with the National Party's so-called deputy leader railing against a Government Minister repeating sentence after sentence of the same tired old political rhetoric without mentioning a single National Party policy. The deputy leader has major portfolio responsibilities affecting very serious public policy issues that the Government of New Zealand is addressing and he did not mention one of those issues. His speech was full of all the usual vitriol and made a personal attack against one member of the Government and it was a shameful performance. 
It was followed by a smattering of applause from a few of his colleagues who had stayed behind to listen to what he had on offer. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Where were the rest? 
DARREN HUGHES 
: I do not know where the rest were but when the Hon Annette King got up in this House to lead off for the Government very early on in her piece she mentioned opinion polls. She mentioned an opinion poll that might be on TV3 at 6 o’clock tonight and National members could not scarper out of this House fast enough. If there had been speed cameras outside in the lobbies this Government would have had a significant revenue collection because they could not wait to go back to whatever little part of this parliamentary complex they now occupy to find out what the results would be. 
We have focused on the polls and no matter which poll one looks at it is bad news for the once-great New Zealand National Party. It keeps changing the goalposts in terms of what poll it wants to take notice of. It wants to look at the TV3 poll but then it is bad so it does not want to look at it. It then looks at the  
National Business Review  
poll but it is no good so it moves away from that one too. It then puts huge emphasis on the Television One poll. 
There are three reasons the National Party feels so good about itself and is so puffed up. One is that it has isolated its poll swing to between 21 percent and 28 percent. Apparently when one is trying to become the leading party in the Parliament of New Zealand it is some great victory to have a poll rating that stabilises in the 21 to 28 percent range. It is absolutely ridiculous. National is also feeling good because Dr Brash has said: “I don’t think Mr English is doing disastrously now; I just think he is doing very very badly.” That means the National Party now has a sense of unity in its team to go along with the new-found fantastic poll rating that it thinks it has. 
But the most telling reason of all that the National Party feels so great about its political prospects in New Zealand is the fact that Mr English has now started to be taken seriously by Mr Peters. Apparently Mr Peters granted Mr English an audience at 3 a.m. at the Hummingbird “convention centre” down Courtenay Place. All of a sudden Mr English feels as though his leadership has purpose and progress because Mr Peters allows him to drink with him in the early hours of the morning down at Hummingbird. Those are the kinds of measurements the National Party now makes of its political progress. 
The National Party is being run by people who call themselves the brat pack—four MPs who like to go to McDonalds and have their photos taken with one another as they order a Big Mac Combo and probably try to trade with each other the little toy that one gets. What happened? The National Party rolled into Parliament in 1990 with 47 percent of the vote. This Chamber was full of National Party MPs. Today the brat pack is in charge and the party is down at 21 percent. It has gone from 47 percent to 21 percent and its members believe they are political geniuses. It is extraordinary. They just get everything wrong. 
Mr Sowry criticised Mr Horomia for not being able to find out some information within 4 hours. Mr Sowry had 4 and a half hours to get his supplementary question right and he could not even say the word “kaumatua”. This is the man who wants to be Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand and he talks about “kaa-mah-tuas” whoever and whatever they are. National members have no vision for New Zealand because they cannot even understand what ordinary New Zealanders care about. It is a terrible state of affairs for them to be in. 
John Key gave a speech and talked about Tranz Rail. I congratulate John Key on that. He actually talked about a policy issue rather than just spouting vitriol and that is why the seat he is currently occupying in the Chamber which belongs to Mr English is one that I believe will be thrust upon him very very shortly. All his colleagues are just useless. He is someone who focuses on the facts. But of course getting it wrong being a typical National Party trait that party gets the issue wrong. On the issue of Tranz Rail when the country is asking who the idiots were who hocked off our rail service in 1993 and put a key infrastructure investment at risk and when the Labour-Progressive Government buys back the tracks securing the assets and infrastructure for New Zealand in a hugely popular move what does the National Party do? It is so desperate to have a policy that its members come out and oppose something that everyone else thinks is common sense. They are an extraordinary bunch of people in that regard. 
So the brat pack must move on. We will give Nick Smith a job as a modern apprentice doing darning or something like that so that he can make rugs for Meridian Energy at a low price. We will try to cure Mr Ryall’s bitterness by making him a bank teller at Kiwibank where he can promote the new credit card. We will give Mr English a job somewhere. He basically agrees with the Government so much that he will limp out of this Parliament join someone’s Labour electorate committee and probably offer himself as a Labour Party candidate somewhere but we cannot promise much. As for Mr Sowry he can pack up his things in his shoebox.