Robertson Grant: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRobertson Grant: General Debate[Sitting date: 26 November 2014. Volume:702;Page:854. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central):It is quite clear which politician John Key would aspire to be. He wants to be Keith Holyoake. He wants to be the National Party leader who goes on and earns a fourth term who gets a moniker like “Kiwi Keith”—Hon Annette King: And becomes Sir.GRANT ROBERTSON: And becomes Sir—absolutely. He wants to become pragmatic and go on to become Governor-General be somebody whom New Zealanders across the divide respect and like. That is whom John Key wants to be.But the politician whom John Key resembles most today is not a New Zealand politician; it is Richard Nixon. That is the politician John Key is becoming. Make no mistake—this work is John Key’s work. This sleaze is John Key’s sleaze. He is the person who employed these people. Any argument that Phil de Joux or Jason Ede are somehow or other doing something that John Key has no knowledge of is rubbish. These people—Jason Ede and Phil de Joux—are doing the job that John Key employed them to do: to run a smear machine out of the Prime Minister’s office. That is what John Key asked them to do. He cannot walk away from this responsibility.So the National Party the once-great National Party of Keith Holyoake is now mired in sleaze and smear in a campaign to undermine a political opponent by using security intelligence information. That is why he is Richard Nixon and not Keith Holyoake—because he is prepared to take the information from the Security Intelligence Service which has the right to spy on New Zealanders and hand it on down the chain to Cameron Slater to use to advantage him; to give that information out as Cheryl Gwyn said for political purposes. That is what the National Party has become.Then they take on a further Nixonian element—they destroy it. To put it into the modern age they have to burn a phone like a character from Breaking Bad which they throw away. They delete the personal emails. They hide their tracks. This is the work of our Prime Minister’s office. This is what is authorised by our Prime Minister. This is how low the National Party has sunk.One of the things that Cheryl Gwyn says in the report is how concerned she is that the Prime Minister’s deputy chief of staff a political appointment is the person for whom the SIS was the direct contact in that office. John Key has effectively outsourced security intelligence work in his office. This is a change from any Prime Minister before now and the result of that is that the information kept on behalf of New Zealanders taken in a privileged manner by the SIS is then used for political purposes because John Key says that is what he thinks of it.John Key has let New Zealanders down. When they look to the office of the Prime Minister they look to find somebody who will stand up for New Zealanders. How many times when Helen Clark was Prime Minister did people say: “I might not agree with her policies but I respect her.”? What John Key has done through this episode is demean the office of Prime Minister. He has demeaned every single one of us in this House. Yesterday in question time and today in question time I felt embarrassed for this Parliament because we had a Prime Minister who chose to divert and diminish and demean what is one of the most shocking episodes in New Zealand political history.This Prime Minister is in the gutter. This Prime Minister is at the lowest ebb of politics with people like Cameron Slater and Jason Ede directed to smear a political opponent. It is an abuse of the power and knowledge of the office of the Prime Minister to use security intelligence information in a political way to destroy evidence and to try to attack an opponent using the offices of the Security Intelligence Service.This Government has sunk lower than any Government in New Zealand’s history when it comes to smearing people. It has lost the respect of New Zealanders. There is no dignity in the office of the Prime Minister today and that should hurt every single one of us in this House. John Key should be ashamed of himself. He is responsible for the actions of these people—of Jason Ede of Phil de Joux and of those in his office. He is the person who should be apologising to New Zealand. His failure to do so means he is not worthy of the office of Prime Minister.