Franks Stephen: New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone Disarmament and Arms Control (Nuclear Propulsion Reform) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Franks Stephen: New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone Disarmament and Arms Control (Nuclear Propulsion Reform) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:627;Page:22111] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT) 
: 
 I am proud to rise to support my colleague’s bill on the nuclear propulsion issue. I am proud because it is in the long tradition of bills motions and amendments that ACT has brought on matters that other parties simply will not touch. I believe that that is a function that the Greens too from the other side of the spectrum perform in this Parliament. They raise issues that the big parties would rather not debate. In this case it is essentially a foreign policy matter. I heard the Minister for Disarmament and Arms Control the Hon Marian Hobbs tell us in relation to the bill debated earlier tonight that one of the things she wanted was to have the hard issues discussed in this House—to take matters that were important to New Zealand but that were difficult to a select committee where New Zealanders could express their views on them. She said in ringing tones that she would vote for the Green bill we debated earlier tonight because she wanted to send it to a select committee. Then I heard the Labour speakers on this bill wanting to close the debate down. They want to close it down because they know that the submissions would be embarrassing. 
We have been a shameful crawling craven lefty country. The kind of credit that David Lange secured by talking about uranium on the breath has long since run out. We now get our credit in international fora by going to the cocktail parties in New York of people who cannot pay their bills—the representatives of countries that cannot even feed themselves. We have elevated that kind of posturing to an art. New Zealand has managed to embarrass itself with the British who have nuclear-propelled vessels with the Americans who have nuclear-propelled vessels that are now accepted in almost every other country in the world and with the Australians. All three countries are our longstanding and natural allies and we have got ourselves into a position whereby we have reneged on defence arrangements with all of them. 
We have paid dearly for that. The Government may sit quietly and pretend that none of that matters because it has hidden quite a lot of the costs. The Minister of Transport knows just how much this country paid when Australia decided to give us the fingers on theopen skies agreement when Australia decided to tell New Zealand that it had better hand part of Air New Zealand to Qantas or else and when Australia decided that we were untrustworthy. Dr Cullen therefore had to go crawling to the Australians and ask whether they would make things up with us if we gave them our banks. He asked them whether if we gave them absolute control of our banking sector they would not trash our economy. 
Hon Harry Duynhoven 
: This is just stuff out of fairyland. 
STEPHEN FRANKS 
: It is out of fairyland. In terms of the New Zealand Government’s foreign policy the Minister for Disarmament and Arms Control has managed not to intervene in support of our so-called sovereignty. The police are about to destroy $2 million worth of perfectly sound sporting firearms because we do not have enough guts to say to the United Nations that those firearms are lawful weapons in this country and that we do not like to waste money. Instead we are kowtowing to the spirit of an agreement that does not even require us to destroy them. 
What connection does that have with this bill? It is that we are primitives. It is that no one is prepared to say that the emperor has no clothes. We have a Government that simply will not stand up and say that it made a big mistake 20 years ago: that it could have banned nuclear weapons and that it could have achieved a situation where it preserved its defence relationships but instead it wanted to punch the nose of the big boy on the block in order to distract itself from internal debates it could not otherwise win. It is pretty much like the student loan bribe. But I will get back to foreign policy. It is like the president of Indonesia picking a fight with Malaysia because he had domestic trouble. This country has been no better than that. Now we are picking a fight with Zimbabwe a little country because we are too scared to tell Mbeki and China that they should stop supporting Mugabe. The vaunted sovereignty position of this country is in absolute disgrace.