Brownlee Gerry: General Debates 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Brownlee Gerry: General Debates 
[Sitting date: 15 October 2003. Volume:612;Page:9190. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (National—Ilam) 
: 
 That was a maiden speech from the member for Hamilton West Mr Martin Gallagher. He could not come into the House to talk about the Supreme Court Bill; he could not come into the House and talk about the GE moratorium being lifted and he could not come into the House and talk about the seabed and foreshore issues because the Labour back bench is the most suppressed group of New Zealanders I have ever known. They are a group of New Zealanders put under a rock and not allowed to say anything until the day they get the opportunity to come into the House and talk about the one thing they are scared of—the National Party. 
Make no mistake about it—those people are making the sorts of decisions in Government that will see them slung out. We have in this country at the moment a Prime Minister who is the most deceptive person ever to occupy that high office. The most deceptive person to ever occupy the high office of Prime Minister is Helen Clark. 
Jill Pettis 
: Oh don’t tell tall tales! 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: They all start howling about how wrong that is but most people cannot hear them because they know it. The Prime Minister does not like the fact that the people of this country do not always believe her. 
We have a media that unfortunately is often moved by the spin of the ninth floor but to its credit I am becoming increasingly aware that this is a Government that is not prepared to defend its own actions in the House. The largest constitutional change this country has seen in this decade—the removal of the right to appeal to the Privy Council—has been rushed through the House without any reference to the people whatsoever. People will slowly start to wake up to that when they find that the judges who are appointed to the Supreme Court are the judges who have already heard their cases in the Court of Appeal and will not want to overturn their own decisions at all. If that is not a constriction of justice goodness knows what is. 
I want to make a couple of comments about the swagger that the Labour Party has on at the moment. Labour Party members are seen around the corridors all thinking that they are about to get an LTD as there is a bit of a Cabinet reshuffle coming up shortly and their own circumstances are being regularly speculated about by their colleagues in the party. A number of them such as Mr Gallagher are making bids for ministerial seats. When a party gets a swagger on like that it is only moments from a stagger. The one thing that will unseat this Government is the poverty it is inflicting upon New Zealanders day by day. Last week I brought up in the House the issue of Statistics New Zealand stating that the average wage and salary earner in this country—most certainly including part-time work—earns only $337 per week. 
Katherine Rich 
: Might as well be on the dole. 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: As my colleague Katherine Rich says they might as well be on the dole. When people are feeling the pinch in their lives like that with such low incomes and such little opportunity to aspire to things to which New Zealanders have always aspired—home ownership for example which is racing out of the reach of most low-income New Zealanders because of the Government’s poor stewardship of the country—they start to ask who cares about them. They will look at a Prime Minister who quite happily excuses her fraudulent activities around “paintergate” who misleads the country over GE in “corngate” who suppresses her Maori backbenchers and caucus from making the sorts of comments they want to make over the constitutional change relating to the Supreme Court. They will look at a Prime Minister who goes off to APEC this week to snuggle up to George Bush in order to try to get a nice photograph knowing full well that the President of the United States and his administration have no time for this Government and have no intention of extending a free-trade agreement to New Zealand as long as it is in office. 
People will work out that that means they will continue to have low incomes. They will continue to be made poor by this Government. Every week New Zealanders are worse off than Australians by at least $250 per week.