Brownlee Gerry: Appropriation (Parliamentary Expenditure Validation) Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
Brownlee Gerry: Appropriation (Parliamentary Expenditure Validation) Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:634;Page:5920] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (Deputy Leader—National) 
: 
 I ask members whether they have noticed that neither of the last two speakers attempted to offer any justification for this legislation at all. 
Hon Annette King 
: That’s right Don didn’t. He didn’t even in the last two speeches. 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: Well the last two Labour speakers to make it clear. 
Hon Annette King 
: You said the last two speakers! 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: Well most certainly the Leader of the Opposition is not going to be justifying this legislation I say to Ms King. She can sit over there laughing all she likes but the reality is that nobody in the Labour Party wants to be on the record justifying the indefensible—the denial of corruption that this bill represents. There is no other way of looking at this whole situation. 
Initially it was all about the pledge card. It got expanded into a whole lot of other things like the Labour Party members putting out pamphlets with candidates on them and various other sorts of things. But essentially it is about the pledge card. The Labour members always knew that they would have a problem with it—the Auditor-General told them the Chief Electoral Officer told them and their own auditors told them. But they sat up on the ninth floor of the Beehive and said that they would do it anyway. They said that they would dip into taxpayers’ funding pay for that pledge card out of taxpayers’ funds and hoped they would get away with it. That was the plan—a plan to deceive the people of New Zealand. 
That is of itself an action that one could say lends itself towards corruption. But the true corruption was that they knew that if they did this they would breach the electoral cap and they would breach section 214B of the Electoral Act because they knew that they were overspending. So there are two crimes here: one is that the Labour Party stole taxpayers’ money the second is that the Labour Party chose to knowingly breach the Electoral Act and spend more than they should. That is described as a corrupt practice. No one on the Labour side of the House wants to have a  
Hansard 
 record that shows him or her justifying that action. 
So we had Michael Cullen coming into the House today saying: “Why aren’t you all grateful for what we are doing because this is a plague on all our houses? The Auditor-General has come down hard on every one of us.” That is wrong. The Auditor-General looked at a snapshot of advertising during the election because it was pointed out to him that the pledge card had to have been paid for from taxpayer funds and he found that to be wrong. As he investigated further he found another $400000 to $500000 worth of breach on the part of the Labour Party. 
People need to be aware of how this worked. Every one of us in this House was required to supply to the Auditor-General all of the advertising all of the information and all of the other activity paid for by the Parliamentary Service in that specific 3-month time frame and he tells us in his report that he went through all of it page by page. He found that some parties had committed minor breaches but he found the overwhelming amount of fraud of corruption and of theft was committed by the Labour Party. That is why we have this report in front of us. 
So there are two things. There is the issue of whether they should pay it back and whether they should pay interest to the taxpayer. The answer is yes. There are thousands of New Zealanders today who are a day or two behind on their tax payments and they will pay interest on that. They will pay penalty interest at a high rate. If Labour were to pay penalty interest today on the 14 months it has had this money available to it it would add another $150000 to its bill topping a million dollars robbed off the taxpayer. I simply ask the Labour members why they cannot treat themselves the way they treat other New Zealanders. 
We have been told that without this legislation today parliamentarians are virtually shut down and cannot operate. Dr Cullen gave the ridiculous example of members of a party in here being told by the Parliamentary Service that they cannot send out Christmas cards this year. The absurdity is that if they chose to send a stamped letter to each of their constituents there would be no problem. If they chose to put “Merry Christmas” on that letter somewhere that would be no problem. But Dr Cullen asserts that sending out a card—something that in the corporate world is quite normal and MPs will find that out through their letterboxes in the coming weeks—is outside the law. Utter rubbish! Dr Cullen would also make an argument that everyone in this House today will have to ask the Parliamentary Service whether it is OK to travel home at its expense tomorrow. Let me tell Dr Cullen that members of Parliament properly elected have rights and we are not about to trade those rights away to make their very big wrong seem a little bit less than it is. 
So I am disappointed that the amendments put forward by the National Party—the idea that there should be a date by which the Labour Party pays back by which New Zealand First pays back and by which all other parties that are required to pay back would do so—which would have given this bill a little more substance were not accepted. But Labour members do not want that because they think that over the passage of time this legislation will be forgotten and if anybody brings up the pledge card they will say: “Oh no no go and have a look it was legal.” because that is what this legislation does. It lets them off the hook and it also is a misuse of Parliament. It is an abuse of the trust that we have as parliamentarians sent here to be leaders in the country and it is a reason why New Zealanders are turning away from the Labour Party in their droves. 
We have seen over and over this Government putting itself above the law considering that if it does it it is OK. Sometimes we struggle to understand that thinking. Dr Brash mentioned the justifications put out by Chris Trotter that well-known left-leaning commentator. He put out a piece a few weeks ago that said that Labour took the money from the taxpayers it overspent on the electoral cap and thank goodness it did it because otherwise we might have had a National Government. If we are going to have a Government that says the ends justify the means then we are giving away all of our democratic rights and we are allowing Helen Clark to establish herself as some sort of potentate dictator which is totally unacceptable in a country like this. 
So when Dr Cullen says that too many members over here are outraged he is wrong—not enough members in this House are outraged. Some of us sit in our electorate offices several times a week listening to the concerns of New Zealanders—people who have real troubles in their lives. They are people who need operations people who are not getting the extra help they need at school people who have issues with various Government departments and people who are trying to do things in the economy but find massive brakes in their way. We listen to those people we hear what they say and we know that a Government that wants this country to make progress would focus on those things. But no this week the brakes go on everything gets stopped everything gets pushed aside and the Labour Government chooses to throw Parliament into urgency to get itself out of trouble to try to manage a political issue. 
As the Prime Minister said on Monday: “We are moving on.” As the previous speaker said: “We are moving on.” I think it is time the Labour Government moved on and I think the people of New Zealand will be giving it that message loud and clear in the months ahead. This legislation is in place to cover corruption to cover bad practice and to cover the theft the Labour Party perpetrated on the people of New Zealand.