Street Maryan: Address in Reply 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Street Maryan: Address in Reply 
[Sitting date: 08 February 2012. Volume:677;Page:196. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 Thank you Mr Deputy Speaker and first of all may I greet you and say happy New Year and welcome back to that position in the Speaker’s Chair.  
The Prime Minister’s speech at the beginning of a parliamentary session should be visionary. It should provide leadership. It should provide the outline of a plan that will navigate this country through some of its most difficult years. And yet all of that was lacking in the speech that came from the Prime Minister late last year.  
Our economy has been downgraded twice under this Government’s watch. The Government’s own forecasts for our economic productivity have had to be downgraded. We have moved from 4 percent 8 months ago down to 3.5 percent and then down to 3 percent and I get the distinct impression that the Government is simply trying to make sure that the country is warmed up to the fact that there will be very little growth in the next 3 years under its stewardship. The Government’s projections are being downgraded by Treasury in the same way that our economy has been downgraded by international agencies under its watch.  
I want to address a couple of issues in particular that demonstrate some of the paucity of leadership that was shown in the Prime Minister’s speech. First of all we come to the vexed issue of the sale of State assets. This is the only plan that the Government would seem to have and it is one that most New Zealanders do not approve of. Regardless of the outcome of the election it is not inconsistent to say that although the Government won the number of seats it did and managed to cobble together a majority it did not win the hearts and minds of people over the issue of the sale of State assets. People oppose this. And why do they oppose it? It is not to do with xenophobia. It is not to do with some kind of racism which the National Government has latched on to in order to frighten people away from debating the issues of ownership and sovereignty in this country. We will not be deterred from talking about sovereignty in this country because Ministers opposite wish to blacken and besmirch the argument with accusations of racism which none of us of course wish to be tarred with because it is not true; we in this country are not racist by practice or racist by inclination.  
But there is no sense in what the Government is planning. The economic sense is not present. Why would we sell or partially sell State assets that over the last few years have been delivering double-digit—15 percent—dividends on average and use that kind of revenue to pay off debt? If we are going to pay off debt that comes in at around about 4.5 percent on average—4 percent generally for short-term loans and 6 percent for long-term loans—if we are going to sell assets that bring us dividends on average of 15 percent in order to offset debt that is costing us somewhere between 4 percent and 6 percent there is no sense. There is no superior economic acumen applying here and there is no plan for recovery in that proposition.  
The other thing that is important about this asset sales debate—which also goes to the question of the Crafar farms which is a different issue in that that is about private property—is the underlying theme that makes this a touchstone for New Zealanders. It is the underlying point around sovereignty around ownership around control of our own destiny and around owning our future. That is the fundamental point.  
Can I just say that this is an argument that is not isolated to New Zealand. It is not isolated to New Zealand. It is something that New Zealanders may feel more strongly about now than they did in the 1980s because we have seen the effects of the sale of assets and not liked them. We have also tuned in to international conversation about the sale of national assets—and the sale of land in particular—that is occurring in Argentina in Uruguay in Brazil in Hong Kong and clearly in Australia as well but in any number of places around the world as nations look to what they can retain control of in a world that is increasingly globalised.  
New Zealand is in a unique position because of the Treaty of Waitangi and this is something that makes our consideration of sovereignty even more pertinent than in other parts of the globe. We have a Treaty that has been more honoured in the breach than in the observance and we are in the process of righting those historical wrongs. So how is it that the Government can be so inept as to foreshadow the cancellation of section 9 of the State-Owned Enterprises Act and the non-application of the Treaty to any private investor in State-owned enterprises on the eve of Waitangi Day? Either that is cynical in the extreme or malicious and wishing to stir up racial foment or it is inept. I do not wish to characterise this Government as malicious because that is dangerous territory. If we have a malicious Government then God help us all. So I will opt for the inept theory.  
It is completely inept that this Government should have ignored what happened in 1986—should not have learnt the lessons from Sir Graham Latimer and the Maori Council in taking the case against a Labour Government at the time which had not thought the issue through to the Privy Council for settlement. As a result of that one of the things that came out of it was the Crown Forestry Rental Trust so that the land could not be sold out from under the forests but the forests could be sold. The trees could be sold but not the land because the land and the ownership of it was still in dispute under the Treaty of Waitangi. What does this Government not understand about the last 26 years of history that made it provoke such outrage against the Government on the eve of Waitangi Day?  
The Government should be leading. The Government should be providing a vision for people that we are moving forward as a united country through difficult times to a place where there is more hope where there is the hope of jobs for young people and where there is a hope of family incomes that families can live on. The Government should be aspirational which was its code word 3 years ago. However it is nothing of the sort now. The Government should be leading it should be aspirational and it should be visionary. The pity of it is that this Government is none of those.