Peters Winston: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Peters Winston: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:615;Page:10792] 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First) 
: 
 There are times in this Parliament when one is truly moved by the eloquence of impassioned and sincere speeches given by inspired orators who lift the standard of this place and give it purpose and meaning for which the public is truly grateful. Thus far this has not been such an occasion. First of all the Prime Minister’s speech reeked of smugness and complacency while the response on my right was a B-grade speech read out by a B-grade leader of a B-grade team and drafted by a B-grade research team. 
 It was devoid of feeling devoid of fact and devoid of memory. A lot of what the National Party leader just said was both true and new. Unfortunately what was true was not new and what was new was sadly not true. It was the verbal equivalent of the Prime Minister being mobbed and mauled by a chihuahua. 
We all know there is an arsenal of ammunition for a political assault on the Prime Minister’s statement. The Prime Minister once again failed to deal with the issues that worry the majority of the New Zealand people. Hers was an appeal to apathy and offers no hope. Our inexorable slide to the Third World continues and every economist knows it. Issues like the soaring cost of electricity and a Minister who promises to add 15 percent on top of that; the simple fact that the cost of running a car has gone up. Up goes the value of our dollar and strangely up goes the price of petrol. What does the Government do? It does nothing whatsoever. 
Then we have the closing of the schools—just like the scores of hospitals the Prime Minister closed when she was a former Minister of Health. We have a health system that is sick. The testimony is that women who are suffering cancer are being exported abroad for treatment. The Government has eroded the great policy that New Zealand First brought in to give free medical care to young New Zealanders. 
We have a skyrocketing dollar that is on the verge of causing exporter meltdown—yet the Government is paralysed and does nothing. Don Brash challenges the Minister of Finance to intervene and then in the next breath he says: “But of course he can’t.” [ 
Interruption 
] It is confusing anyway. I remember when he was head of the Reserve Bank and Bill Birch was the Minister of Finance and between 1994 and 1996 our dollar rose by 26 percent and the Government did nothing. It is happening all over again. The Government will do nothing. 
Hon Ken Shirley 
: What would you do? 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: I would do what I did last time—drive the dollar down. All the evidence is there. The recovery of provincial New Zealand is owed to that fact and members opposite know it. So one wonders from whence comes the conceit to suggest that the Prime Minister is the victim of her own success as a popular and competent Prime Minister. History of course—when the press gallery have stopped being so effervescent about it all—will take a different view. Already the signs of failure are growing behind the feel-good facade the spin and the propaganda carefully cultivated by the Ministers and their minders. It is a facade of prosperity but it is born on the back of the politics of consumption and it will not last. We see a property boom that has as its key driver wholesale open-door immigration. That will not last. But try as it might nothing can obscure the fact that this Government is failing on the most fundamental issues. 
Our standard of living against the OECD countries is in decline. Nothing that Labour has done or what the Prime Minister said today can stop that. Our quality of life as New Zealanders is deteriorating every day and nothing that the Prime Minister has said today or Labour has done can stop that. More and more New Zealanders as we all know are today time poor—no time for their families or even their friends. Some of them are out working two and three jobs. They live now to work. They no longer work to live. Nothing that Labour has said today or done in the last 5 years can change that. 
Three years ago the esteemed British publication  
The Economist 
 warned as follows. It said: “New Zealand looks to be the first country in 50 years to go from the First World to the Third World” and nothing Labour has done can stop that. It is all very well for Don Brash to refer to Australia in 1984 and the comparative growth rates between that country and ours—up one-third from New Zealand in comparative terms in Australia. Let me ask this question of my colleagues those who have a memory. Who was on the other side who started the right-wing experiment of 1984 and who over here supported them? It is all very well now to say: “I’ve had some sort of economic Damascus experience.” but it is a bit late when one is 62 years of age. Usually one has to be a young prophet before one can become an old one. Let me say that as a country we are treading water economically and in foreign policy we have become a lonely group of islands at the bottom of the world. The former friends we once had are now purely acquaintances. 
One of the issues most fundamental to any society is law and order and if there is one area where the Government’s smugness is totally unjustified it is there. We New Zealanders have a right to be safe in our homes and safe on our streets. It does not get much more basic than that. But Helen Clark and Labour are not much bothered about what actually happens to ordinary New Zealanders because in her long speech only one paragraph was devoted to crime—one paragraph out of 97 was devoted to the most severe problem in our country. 
We are being hit by a crime wave that mars the lives of tens of thousands of New Zealanders and Helen Clark and Labour dismiss it with one paragraph of clichés. This Government’s response to crime is characterised by resignation and defeat. Its crime strategy reminds me of the song that Dusty Springfield used to sing: “… wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin and prayin ” that somehow it might get better. 
Well we have had enough of the rhetoric enough of the navel-gazing enough of the rationalising enough of the excuse-making and enough of the wishing the hoping the thinking and the praying. New Zealanders want action. They want the police to be out there fighting crime not hiding in the bushes on the side of the road and taking photographs of cars going by. 
Why was there nothing new about tackling crime in the Prime Minister’s speech? Unless the Government takes drastic action crime will go on increasing crime will be a paying proposition and crime will take on new and ever-increasing dangerous dimensions such as the infiltration and growth of Maori gangs and Asian gangs. Let us face an unpleasant fact: the biggest growth industry under this Government is prostitution—and child prostitution. Girls as young as 14 are working in the brothels established under this Government. 
I turn now to the Treaty of Waitangi. For Labour and its acolytes the treaty is the measure of all things—the Holy Grail the touchstone the alpha and omega. It is everything. But for National after Orewa the treaty is to be air-brushed out of history like one of Stalin’s henchmen who has been denounced. I want to ask these questions after Orewa of every journalist who has half a memory: who was it—own up please—who gave Doug Graham a knighthood and what was the justification for it? 
Gerry Brownlee 
: Her Majesty. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: Oh now they are blaming the Queen! They have the Prime Minister’s habit. Now they are blaming Her Majesty. It is amazing is it not? I want New Zealanders to remember on this issue that a leopard never changes its spots. Both Labour and National in different ways are seeking to perpetrate a massive fraud on the rest of us on the treaty issue. 
John Carter 
: This is a bit rich. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: No I will tell members what is rich: it is having warned National for 16 long years to have them at last take up this cause after they have done so much damage—so much carnage in respect of our social life. This year’s National leader—for the time being—rose at Orewa in his co-called state of the nation address seemingly oblivious to history and fact and claimed that he and his MPs have been asking questions in Parliament about what the principles of the treaty mean. Let me ask the press gallery: is that so? Is that true; can that be a fact? I am holding here the record of questions lodged by New Zealand First—that my colleagues and I have asked—and I ask someone to pray tell me when National has asked one—[ 
Interruption 
] 
Mr SPEAKER 
: I said there were to be no interjections. I allow the odd one because the member scores off them very well but interjecting from behind him is not allowed. 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS 
: Thank you Mr Speaker but I think we have had a late conversion and he is on my side now. Is that a fact? What questions are on National’s list? When has Don Brash ever asked a question since he has been here about the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi? Members know that that leader’s record on this issue is not a syllable not a sound not a mutter not a murmur. That is the record. 
We are not criticising his attempt to plagiarise New Zealand First’s position on this issue. After all imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. It really is. But how about an acknowledgment; how about a bit of honesty? We in New Zealand First say to National and make it very clear: “Steal our policies if you will; we don’t mind. Steal our phrases steal our language steal our speeches; we don’t mind. But to be sincere on this issue one has to have courage one has to have conviction one has to have commitment and staying power and one has to have an alternative vision.” What is theirs? Ours has always been Ka Awatea—a vision that National jettisoned but one we will revive. National’s record on those four things is that of a moral vacuum. 
The treaty should bind us but for a long time it has become a source of division and real leadership is needed to overcome that. We are losing sight of the fact that those who signed and supported the treaty had something back then that is in short supply today—vision. Their vision was of a united country and a people at peace with each other respecting and acknowledging each other. 
 When we look back at the world of 1840 and the record of human affairs since then New Zealand got a far better start than anywhere else in the world. That is a fact. To Labour we say: “Stop treating the treaty like some sort of all-purpose gap filler that has to appear in all legislation all policy and every document.” To National we say that owning up to its own past conduct in promoting the burgeoning treaty industry is well overdue. 
As for the Orewa doctrine let us all ask ourselves this question: what doctrine disowns the daughter of New Zealand’s pre-eminent longest-established Maori family—who gave the massive territory of Tongariro National Park to this country without any payment whatsoever as a gift for every New Zealander—and whose political record has always been one of moderation and respect? [ 
Interruption 
] If Georgina te Heuheu is a radical I would hate to see a conservative. 
We say again to National they may plagiarise our speeches plagiarise our phrases and plagiarise our questions in Parliament but they will never plagiarise our principles our courage and our vision for this country and our preparation to put our career as subservient to the things we believe in. For the past 16 years we have warned about separatism and the treaty industry. National ignored those warnings and helped set it up. I know; I was there—and it is a bit rich to play Pontius Pilate today and hope that people have forgotten. 
Our position in New Zealand First on the treaty industry is that it is unravelling the social fabric and cohesion of this country. We said it a long time before this “Donny come lately” came along and borrowed our speeches. In short we in New Zealand First represent New Zealanders of all backgrounds. It is a bit rich to argue that there is no need for the Maori seats—as we argue—when they have not proven once that they intend to do anything about a fair representation of people in Parliament. Our proud record is to not just say we are for a single franchise; we have set out to prove it. I am pleased for my colleagues and this party’s supporters and its members that we have done something about it when others merely talk. 
In January this year a  
Herald 
-DigiPoll said that far too many people were coming to this country according to New Zealanders. The “head in the sand” Minister of Immigration should have regard to that. We know that the rate of immigration has been and continues to be excessive. We know that the Government is running a settler policy aimed at swamping our own population. When I heard the Orewa speech I thought to myself: “What does National think about this policy?”. They want 10 million New Zealanders. They have said so—10 million. Forget about our background heritage ecology and environment. Apparently it is the Business Roundtable policy and they are supporting it—simple stuff. Change a whole nation—because one can holiday where one likes if one has money—but for ordinary New Zealander who are working this is all they have and we have a duty to protect it. 
The Prime Minister and her colleagues prefer to live in their own politically correct never-never land—a never-never land that throws a Sri Lankan rape victim back to the abuse from whence she came yet spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on a suspected terrorist in New Zealand. How is that for priorities? Send home a sick teenager to the same misery from whence she sought to escape; yet keep here at possibly now $300000 a terrorist. How come every leader who has been briefed on this man has come to the same opinion? I cannot divulge what we were told but right across the spectrum we are all of the same view. 
The Prime Minister has confirmed that she has lost sight so have her colleagues of what is important to New Zealanders. We in New Zealand First are the only party in this Parliament to commit ourselves to addressing the concerns and priorities of all New Zealanders because we do not share this Government’s view that New Zealand is nothing more than a collection of sub-tribes—European Maori Pacific people the Indian community the Chinese community and so on. We do not share that view. We have a vision that these people will contribute to something unique in the world called a New Zealand culture—something unique that is New Zealand. We say to the Government therefore give political correctness a rest and work on the basics. We say to the B team—stick to banking.