Little Andrew: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLittle Andrew: General Debate[Sitting date: 23 September 2015. Volume:709;Page:6931. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ANDREW LITTLE (Leader of the Opposition): I move That the House take note of miscellaneous business. Well we have a Prime Minister who cannot help but make a pig’s ear of his job at the moment. Everything he touches just turns to dust. Let us start with the flag referendum because that is a talking point for a lot of people. This was a Prime Minister who repeatedly talked up to the people of New Zealand that we must have a changed flag and it must have a silver fern on it. He assembled his great Flag Consideration Panel and put dozens of the good and the great on it. For a panel that had the job of designing a new flag how many designers do you think were on the panel? Just how many designers do you think were on a flag redesign panel? Not a single one. Not a single one.Then the panel went touring the country going out to the good citizens of New Zealand and said “Come hither all. Tell us your ideas about the flag.” and an average of 29 people turned up to eachmeeting so they were not particularly interested. Then the panel members thought they had better get a bit of advice on design and they got someone in for a couple of hours right at the end of the process to tell them about flag design. Then the independent objective Flag Consideration Panel put its recommendations up to the Government and what should come out? Four choices and what is on three of them? A silver fern to meet the wishes of the Prime Minister of the day. And one other design the koru which not many people understood.Well what has actually happened is that the people of New Zealand do understand that they have been manipulated and cajoled and pushed into something that they just do not want. We saw that in the poll over the weekend—70 percent of New Zealanders do not want to change the flag. The absolute shambles that the whole flag consideration project is sits firmly at the feet of the Prime Minister who will not listen and who will not learn. He does his level best as he always does to sort of yank it back to something that the Labour Party did in 1972 because somehow that is the reason why people have got disillusioned with his conduct and his Flag Consideration Panel.There is something else that is going on. We are a country that is facing a large number of challenges. We have rising unemployment. There are 13000 more unemployed now than there were this time last year. We have an economy that is rapidly slowing. Can you rapidly slow? Well you slow down and it gets slower. We have massive job cuts now—and would you believe—in the industry that has sustained this economy for so many years for so many decades: agriculture and dairy. What is happening? Our biggest dairy company Fonterra is laying off hundreds of people—the organisation that we look to for research and development new ideas and innovation in dairy laying off hundreds of people because of this Government’s failure to support it.We have the regions doing it tough. Taranaki my beloved home is now in official recession. There are Aucklanders who are still trying to get into their first home and cannot and nor can thousands of others around New Zealand. New Zealand is now suffering the lowest level of homeownership. Schools are having to dip into their operational grants to feed hungry kids because child poverty is so widespread in this country—so widespread in this country. Hospitals are booting patients out in their pyjamas because they cannot afford to keep them in their beds. This is New Zealand 2015 and that is a hospital system that has had $1.7 billion cut from it.What is the Government’s response to all of this? What do you do when a country is not so much on the cusp but on the brink? What do you do to it? Well you announce the next big measure. We are going to have a panda at Wellington Zoo. This is the answer: fluffy pandas for a fluffy Government for a fluffy Prime Minister who does not know what to do when faced with bad news. That is what we have come to now.Of course it does not stop there. The schools are now so desperate for cash that they have set the repo man on to the parents who will not pay their voluntary contributions and the Ministry of Education is not far behind—it has got the leather-clad ones chasing the teachers who have been the victims of a botched pay system. This is New Zealand today under this Government—after everything it has done now the chickens are coming home to roost and it is not good. People are suffering and New Zealanders want it to come to an end. They want a New Zealand they can be proud of with a flag they can be proud of and with a Prime Minister who cares about them—but a Prime Minister who listens.