Henare Tau: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Henare Tau: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 21 July 2010. Volume:665;Page:12543. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon TAU HENARE (National) 
: 
 Thirty days ago—as opposed to 29 days ago as it was yesterday—there was a bit of an event. I will reintroduce the topic of that event and draw some similarities between it and what happened over the last 9 years of what I consider to be some of the best economic times that we have seen and one of the most appalling wastes of time that this country has seen. 
The 9 years of the previous Labour Government saw a great move forward in terms of our bank balance but literally nothing happened. The plaque around the arteries got clogged up and like my own cardiac event—they call it a cardiac event these days; they do not call it a heart attack—nothing got through. The red corpuscles did not get through to the tissues of this country. 
I will do something that has not been done yet in this House which is to congratulate Gerry Brownlee on a job well done. At least he stuck his neck on the line for his country. He stuck his neck on the line. I support the mining industry in this country; I support it 100 percent. It is the people across the Chamber who do not support our move forward and our looking after our grandchildren and children. That is what the decision is all about. That is what our decisions are based on. Our decisions are based on our children and our grandchildren’s future. 
Members on that side will tell us that they have all the answers. Well if they had all the answers then we would not be sitting on this side of the Chamber and they would not be sitting on that side. The fact of the matter is that after 9 long years of good economic times the country had had a gutsful of the way that Labour had played the game. 
I will talk about the whole issue of the 90-day trial period. A long long time ago back in the 1980s I was a union organiser with one of the better unions around—the Northern Clerical Workers Union. Every member of the Northern Clerical Workers Union had to have a trial period. It was written in the national award that there was a trial period for every new employee. Members opposite say that the 90-day trial is just National being anti-union. I will tell members what I am anti: the people who run the unions who think that it is their God-given right to tell workers what to do. I wonder what Andrew Little’s wage is. I wonder whether it is the wage of a normal working-class engineer or of a member of the Engineering Printing and Manufacturing Union. I bet members that it is not. 
I bet members that some of the union boys whom I used to know—I know I am supposed to be calm because it was only a month ago that I had a bit of an event. This matter has nothing to do with my health; it has everything to do with this country’s health. That is why at the last election people voted for us to get through the hard times. It always happens. National is put into office during hard times because a National Government is the only one that can get this country through the hard times with forward-looking legislation. We talk about our future; we know our future. We want a brighter and better future for our kids and our grandchildren and we are certainly not going to get it if we leave it to that lot over there. 
The debate having concluded the motion lapsed.