Mallard Trevor: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Mallard Trevor: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 11 May 2011. Volume:672;Page:18563. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South) 
: 
 We can tell when a Government is in trouble. It is when it focuses on the Opposition and not on its own policies.  
I ask the House how many people were listening this afternoon when John Key told the House that he did not know when Merrill Lynch got into trouble. That was the Prime Minister who previously told the House that he got up every morning and looked at what was happening to Merrill Lynch shares. That was the Prime Minister who had $40 million riding on Merrill Lynch. He knew that it collapsed in the first half of September. He knew that he made commitments about KiwiSaver in October. To pretend that the global financial crisis happened after he made his commitments is to reinvent history and outside this House we could call him a lot of other things. That goes for a number of comments I will make.  
Hon Member 
: What are you smoking? 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: I hear the intellectual wing starting up down the back of the House. Mr Quinn is away again. The brightest man in National is chipping away again.  
Paul Quinn 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I said nothing of the sort. I was— 
Mr SPEAKER 
: The member will resume his seat immediately. It is no grounds to interrupt the member who is speaking just because someone disagrees with what the member is saying. The member can take a call but I do not want members to be interrupted in mid-flight.  
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: At some risk of commenting on your ruling Mr Speaker I say to Mr Quinn that sometimes it is better to keep his mouth shut and let people think he is a fool than to open his mouth and prove it.  
Let us talk about the BMWs because what we know today is a scandal. We know that John Key went to a fundraiser at BMW. His office knew he went to a fundraiser at BMW. Notwithstanding that his staff sat down with VIP Transport Service and with Ministerial Services and agreed to an upgrade and a renewal of a contract for BMWs and 2 days later $50000 went to the National Party. If that happened overseas we would say it was corruption. We of course cannot and will not make that allegation in the House but if that had happened in Australia in New South Wales Thailand or India I would have called it corruption. It is wrong. 
There is certainly at least a perception of a conflict that the Prime Minister is responsible for. No one else in this House is responsible for that. He is responsible twice: he is responsible as the Minister responsible for Ministerial Services and he is responsible as the Prime Minister who is responsible for the  
Cabinet Manual 
 as it concerns the conduct public duty and personal interest of Ministers. In this particular case I make no allegation of personal interest but I say that there was a donation from a BMW dealer that was preceded by a personal visit to that dealer’s office. What did the Prime Minister do? He schmoozed up to the clients of that BMW dealer got $50000 for the National Party for doing it and there was an order for BMWs all within the period of about 3 weeks. That is outrageous. That is not the sort of thing— 
Chris Tremain 
: The Labour Party signed the contract.  
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: The New Zealand Labour Party never ever schmoozed up in that way. It never used taxpayers’ funds—millions of dollars—on BMWs and got something in the back pocket for the party. We would never do that because this party has ethics.  
I say that John Key does not know the difference between being a chief executive officer in business and being the Prime Minister of New Zealand. He is taking the morals and ethics of Merrill Lynch a company that was at the dirt end of a lot of deals and went down when the global financial crisis came. They did not have the ethics to do proper deals. He was in the middle of that and that is the level of ethics that he has transferred to being the Prime Minister of New Zealand. I say to him that we do not believe in that sort of approach in New Zealand. We have higher standards for our Prime Ministers. We do not have extra carpet being laid through Premier House at the same time we are cutting hours for old people. We do not have Murray McCully taking a jaunt spending $70000 on a plane in a way that was absolutely unnecessary while old people are being hurt.