Key John: General Debate 
Key John: General Debate 
[Volume:620;Page:15892] 
JOHN KEY (National—Helensville) 
: 
 I am not surprised to learn that the Minister of Health has in her no doubt extensive library  
The Little Book of Calm 
. No doubt she will not be able to share it with most of the members of the Labour Party because it did not look as though it had a lot of pictures of it. I suggest that she leaves it on her desk for the vein-popping Minister Phil Goff to read the next time he is having a cardiac arrest when he is answering a relatively simple question in the House about why he supports New Zealanders as young as 12 being allowed to have sex or why he thinks it is OK to pay compensation to some of the worst criminals in the country. Maybe that is why he needs a book of calm. 
What is going wrong in the Minister of Finance’s office? What is actually going on in the Minister of Finance’s office? The Minister of Finance is a man who is used to doing the work of 10 men. He is used to being the Prime Minister in disguise. He is used to being the “Minister of Fix-it”. He is used to doing 10 jobs for the Labour Party and to holding up the failing Government. What is going wrong in the Minister of Finance’s mind? The Minister of Finance is now tremendously confused about whether he is also the Governor of the Reserve Bank. He thinks he is the Governor of the Reserve Bank; he is tremendously confused about his job. A few weeks ago we saw him get up in the House and commit what can only be described as a “base rate blooper”: he announced to the country that interest rates were to go up. Oops! He did that just 24 hours before the Reserve Bank governor was meant to do it. I think the Minister of Finance is quite jealous of Dr Brash. He looked across and saw that being Governor of the Reserve Bank was a pretty good job. 
So much did the Minister of Finance enjoy the domestic strategy of putting up interest rates that he has now rolled that out into a global strategy. That is right. He went off to New York and chipped away about how interest rates are to go up two or three times or as many times as he has fingers on his hand. He was out there parroting away. What did the Minister of Finance tell people? He gave a very interesting interview chipping away like a little chihuahua up there in New York and told the Dow Jones analysts that not only will he spend like a drunken sailor given half the chance but also that he will talk like a drunken sailor as well. They must have been wondering where on earth the Minister of Finance had come from. They would have thought the Reserve Bank of New Zealand was independent. They would have flicked through the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Act and seen the word “independent”. 
I am surprised that Annette King’s little book is not a dictionary. She should give it to the Minister of Finance who thinks he is the Reserve Bank governor and get him to define what “independent” means. There he was in New York chipping away to the international media about how interests rates are to go up to 9 percent in New Zealand. It was very nice of him to tell mortgage-belt New Zealand that its interest rates are going up to 9 percent. He does not want to go up and down the country in New Zealand and tell people that interest rates are going up to 9 percent. He would rather tell that to people in New York because he does not think we will find that out back here in our cosy little enclave down in the South Pacific. He would rather let people know the good news there in New York. 
 I suppose that the only question I really have for the Minister of Finance is whether he has actually told Dr Bollard that. Dr Bollard came to the Finance and Expenditure Committee but he did not say that interest rates were going up three times. He did not say that floating mortgage rates were going up to 9 percent. He said that there may be one more hike. So one can imagine the shock and dismay of international investors when they found out that news. We have to ask ourselves where it leaves us when our so-called independent Governor of the Reserve Bank is bagged by the Minister of Finance who has gone offshore and said that the governor is not doing his job properly. There is a word I cannot use in this Parliament but some members on the Government side of the House were very quick to put the boot in when they were previously on the Opposition side of the House. But now we have had the Minister of Finance go to New York and bag the Governor of the Reserve Bank. That is what he has done—what a vote of no confidence that is! I hope the governor has an iron-tight contract. Alan Bollard will be sitting over there on The Terrace and absolutely trembling because his boss is in New York slating him. He is absolutely slating him! The No. 1 risk to the New Zealand economy is his interest rate management—what a shocker that is! 
Old Michael Cullen is on a bit of a roll. I do not know whether he was suffering from air sickness or a bit of turbulence or what was going on. Not only was he happy to tell the world that interest rates are going up three times but lo and behold he said not to tell anyone that because it was a secret. He said he had been running a thing called the “OBERAC”—the operating balance excluding revaluations and accounting changes or the operating surplus—and telling everyone that there was no money but now he was going to spend it.