Tamihere John: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Tamihere John: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:606;Page:3374] 
Hon JOHN TAMIHERE (Minister of Youth Affairs) 
: 
 I am proud to stand in the debate today. Before I continue in the true tradition of the Labour Party I want to take my time in the first part of my first speech in this session to thank the workers who make the place really tick. That is not Opposition members of course because they never work. To the Office of Clerk the Clerks the messengers to security and to the people who help to feed us in Bellamys I acknowledge that we always think of them. We are a party that represents the best interests of all Kiwis not just the few in the name of many.  
I want to pause and pay a special mihi to one of the security officers who died tragically in an accident just before Parliament resumed. E tu te arai kua wheturangitia. Tenei te mihi atu e te rangatira Sam. Moe mai moe mai a moengaroa. He aroha ki a koutou mo te whanau pani. Kai te mihi kai te mihi kai te mihi nunui ki a koutou. Kia kaha kia toa kia manawa nui. 
[ 
Rise up the veil; a life has passed over the horizon. This is my tribute to you Sam the chief. Rest there repose there in the long sleep. My condolences to you the bereaved family. My sympathy and deep commiseration to you. Be strong be brave and be stout-hearted 
.] 
First of all I want to address treaty issues and Maori relationships in that regard. 
Dr Wayne Mapp 
: Why does the member fold his arms at that point? 
Hon JOHN TAMIHERE 
: There is Dr Wayne Mapp who likes to interject. The alumni from the University of Auckland really get desperate when Wayne Mapp gets up to speak in this House. “How the hell did he get a doctorate?” they have to say— “What happened?”. There was obviously a mistake.  
In respect of the treaty we are in a very special moment in time in the rollout of our nationhood. Our leadership will be called upon across every sector in our society regardless of colour race or creed. In terms of the treaty debate the principles of the treaty have been espoused within our constitutional framework. It amazes me that simpletons sitting on the front bench opposite do not know what the principles are. Dr Wayne Mapp as an ex-lecturer at Auckland University—I do not think he will ever get a job back there again—used to try to lecture on these matters and did a much better job when he lectured on them than when taking cheap political shots. 
It was all about this. The constitution as it rolls itself out means that the courts do play an integral and very important role in the definition of a number of laws laid down in this House. That is where a range of principles have been enunciated over the last 15 years. We have a huge jurisprudential background lasting over 15 years. The benchmarks and the precedents are in place. This Government has seen fit to ensure that the last two major settlements that set the benchmarks and complete them in a national sense have been completed. Those settlements are on the West Coast in terms of the Taranaki peoples and now on the eastern seaboard for the Bay of Plenty peoples—Tairawhiti—with the signing in of the Ngati Awa claim.  
What I stand for here today and am proud about is that only this Labour-led Government could have achieved the turning-point in historical treaty settlement processes—led by a Minister who is much maligned and often misunderstood. She is Margaret Wilson the Minister in charge of Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations. So we have hit the top of the process and we are on the way down. Treaty settlements will start to accelerate because the benchmarks are in place.  
I have to say in concluding my remarks on the treaty debate that because the precedents are in place and because our system is incremental and evolutionary I often wonder why we have to continue to revisit a number of issues that the Hon Bill English led and voted on. Every member opposite we will say for those who have entered the House in the year 2001 has voted affirmatively in favour of treaty clauses. They shaped the history of this nation when they ran the Treasury benches for 10 years and the selective dementia that is practised by them when they try to use this very important debate about our nationhood to divide and rule it amazes me. That type of leadership should be shown for the bankruptcy that it is.  
I want to talk now about the status and standard of Opposition politics and parties because in a robust democracy we must have an Opposition. I am disgusted by the status and standard of and lack of vim and vigour on the Opposition benches. This cannot be a safe democracy with the level of incompetence that is exhibited day in and day out on the opposite benches. Those members struggle to lead the Opposition. It is no wonder that Kiwis vote for us in the polls at 50 percentage points because they know that we are the safe drivers of the economy and of nationhood in its rollout. They know we talk about all Kiwis; we are not talking about the favoured few of the ACT party.  
In talking about the Opposition parties I wanted to start looking at the National Party. I will spend a minute talking in terms of its leadership vision policies and capabilities. And here it is—! Now that we have had a minute’s silence—because that is about all that party gets—we will move across to my good friends colleagues fellow citizens and Maori over there in the New Zealand First caucus. That party would be one of the most interesting in a Kiwi democracy because it does not have a caucus or caucus meetings. Its leader arrives in a cab 5 minutes before the House has to sit for question time at 2 o’clock on a caucus day when other parties normally meet. New Zealand First members walk into Parliament like Brown’s cows or stunned mullets and sit over on the Opposition benches.  
The “tight six”—that is the Maori members; Pakeha voters in Tauranga never knew there would be six of them on the list—come into the House. We call them the tight six on this side of the House because we would not know their names that they exist or what they stand for—apart from one bloke who has been on the Waitangi celebrations committee since 1984 and if one wanted someone to sit on a committee who knows how it should not work I would appoint him.  
I move over now to my good friends and colleagues. My good friend Clayton Cosgrove from Waimakariri has indicated a few issues with the ACT party. That party is a circus with the best conductor of a circus and biggest clown of a leader that we have at the moment. Big funders pump hundreds of thousands of dollars into that party in every election. In fact it costs the ACT party multiples of 20 times per vote in respect of the type of money that is pumped into it in order for it to try to buy its way into this Parliament. A number of that party’s rorts have come home to roost and day in and day out as Donna Awatere Huata sits up the back there it is a continual memorial to the types of rorts the lack of ethics and the lack of standards that she learnt very well right in the bowels of that party. That is what it stands for.  
We can talk about integrity credibility and honesty but the people who fund it have once again “rorted” New Zealand taxpayers—rather New Zealand shareholders—in Tranz Rail. The Fay Richwhite boys sat there yet again and sold their shares down. Three months after selling their shares down $170 million is written off. That is not only disgusting; that sort of corruption is what we are in business to sort out. We are well on the way to doing it and I am grateful and proud that I am in a team that will hunt that sort of nonsense down but we have to remind our children what they got up to in the 1980s over the privatisation campaign.  
And another issue will be raised: the multimillionaire son of a poor preacher man who leads that party. He has not had a job outside the 3 years when Sandra Lee turfed him out of central Auckland. There will be a lot more to come home to roost about that man’s integrity credibility and honesty as to how he became a multimillionaire. It is all a rort about the privatisation campaigns and members should watch this space for the way in which Mr Hide is associated with the Gibbs and Farmers of this world and they will start to know exactly what we must always fight against in this country—the worst sort of crime which is white-collar crime. They walk away from it day in and day out.  
So we have to say about this circus called the ACT party that there is absolutely no way that the National Party can get anywhere near a Government when it is lined up with that shemozzle and we will talk about its lack of ethics and morality. I am just grateful to be on this side of the House being led by somebody with some integrity and credibility who is willing to face up and front up. We are robust accountable and transparent unlike certain parties in this House.