Brownlee Gerry: General Debate 
Brownlee Gerry: General Debate 
[Volume:646;Page:15503] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (National—Ilam) 
: 
 It is particularly galling to hear this afternoon successive Labour speakers talk about principle. They suggest that Labour is a principled Government somehow better than everybody else on the political horizon and better than everybody else in this House. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Labour Party is the biggest burglar of taxpayer funds—which have been applied for its own electoral benefit—that this country has ever seen. The burglary is far worse than any of the old pork-barrel politics of the old first-past-the-post days. The spectacular burglary of taxpayer funds by the Labour Party in 2005—and it admitted today in 2002 and 1999—and now again in 2008 should have every New Zealander utterly disgusted and completely cynical about anything this Government claims. 
I have in front of me a quote from the great poet Sir Walter Scott: O what a tangled web we weave when first we set out to deceive! That is exactly what Labour has done with the Electoral Finance Act. It is a two-faced approach to a law such as has never been seen by this country before. As my colleague Bill English so well put it Labour has spent 2 years telling the nation it would get rid of corruption from the political process and all of that time it was planning how it could rort its own laws. Now Labour is caught in the most tangled web of a mess that anybody could possibly imagine. Not only is Labour’s own material found to be breaching the current electoral law on a number of counts but it has also got its coalition colleague New Zealand First in a very very deep mess. 
The Rt Hon Winston Peters can say what he likes in the House today; the reality is that the Fonterra issue will not be resolved before the election the Auckland airport issue is unlikely to be resolved before the election and if he keeps holding out on the free-trade agreement that also may not be resolved before the next election. So every single defence—thin as it is—he mounts against the proposal that he has broken the law is wrong. He will be caught because he stuck his hand up and said: “I think Helen Clark is really smart. I think she has worked out a cunning way to rort the people of New Zealand and I am going along with it.” I hope that when the Electoral Commission considers this matter in the days ahead it brings down a judgment that will see New Zealand First paying the price for getting tied up with such a deceptive character as Helen Clark. 
We heard today the Government members after they had got over their little groans at the start of their speeches trying desperately to talk about some of the things they say were good for New Zealand from 1 April this year. I heard Trevor Mallard say how wonderful it was that the minimum wage in this country has now gone to $12 an hour. Yesterday the Minister of Finance stood in the House and told us that under Labour’s watch we have had the longest period of economic growth ever in New Zealand’s history. The members over there nod their heads. If the New Zealand economy has grown so big why have the pay packets of hard-working New Zealanders not grown? Why have the pay packets of hard-working New Zealanders not grown along with the rest of the economy? 
Hon Lianne Dalziel 
: They have! 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: Well that member should go through the supermarket with an average family on an average wage and see what it costs just to buy food. That member should go out with an average family to the service station and see what it costs to fill the car to take the kids to school to take the kids to their sport on a Saturday afternoon and to get to work during the week. That member should go to the homes of New Zealanders during the coming cold winter and tell them they are lucky to be paying an extra 48 percent for their electricity under this current Government. This is what economic growth under Labour is all about. Economic growth under Labour is about economic impoverishment of average workers and that is why Labour will lose the next election.