Cosgrove Clayton: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeCosgrove Clayton: General Debate[Sitting date: 16 October 2013. Volume:694;Page:13930. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE (Labour): Freedom of speech—great! Bill English the Deputy Prime Minister of this country is a man who is propped up. The only reason he has his job today is because he is propped up by a rotten pile by a member of Parliament who is already a convicted criminal who already has a criminal conviction to his name and who is now about to stand trial for election fraud. That one person is of course the Hon John Archibald “Brown Bag Banks”. That is it.The Deputy Prime Minister is propped up by a rotten pile. That member is a sort of BasilFawlty of Parliament withFawlty Towers being his Government. Under his watch with the Minister for State Owned Enterprises he bumbled around like BasilFawlty blaming everybody else stumbling in the dark. He is aided and abetted by Manuel over there the Minister for State Owned Enterprises who says: “I no complain.I see nothing. I know nothing.” He let Solid Energy go down the gurgler. He let Solid Energy go down the gurgler.When it comes to the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ he stands accused of mismanagement and of negligence. This is of course the man who said he would not let Solid Energy fail. Then weeks and months later as the negotiations with the banks continued he undermined his own chairman—he grins away—and did not even tell Mark Ford as he dropped a bundle on him and said: “Well we may let it tip over.” Those are great negotiating tactics. Then of course he announces—in his own slipshod way bumbling around in the dark—that we have a deal like a sort of second-rate game show host saying: “We have a deal. It’s done. It’s zipped up. Everybody’s falling in line.” That was 10 days ago.But 96 hours after that—96 hours after that Basil—the Bank of Tokyo drops the ball on him and goes to court. When I was in the private sector a deal sort of went like this: you got round the table you got an agreement you got the ink dry on the document everybody agreed and then you announced it to the world—but oh no not Bill English. He shot his mouth off he shot his bolt and now he is about to get shot by the Bank of Tokyo.Of course this is the man who negotiated a fabulous deal with RioTinto. It was totally negligent. This is the man who came to this House and said that the $30 million free gift was to secure Southland jobs. That is what he said over and over and over again. On Kathryn Ryan’s show with me he must have said it five times. When the deal is on the rocks we then find out that there is no guarantee of any of those jobs not even up to 1 January 2017. Then we asked whether the Minister bothered in the heavy duty negotiations—or Manuel over there—to actually ask for a guarantee. You know if you do not ask you do not get. That is the normal sort of modus operandi. He did not have the gumption. He was negligent. He mismanaged it.This is the guy of course who then went over the top of his board in the Meridian Energy deal per se—a $30 million free gift and he sits there every day misleading the New Zealand people saying that he secured the jobs. Not 4 days before that deal was done before the ink was dry on the cheque they were sacking maintenance workers at RioTinto. He got no guarantee and he did not have the brains as he bumbles around in the dark to ask RioTinto—or to beg RioTinto—for $30 million or for 30 million pieces of silver to actually secure those jobs.Then there is Mighty River Power. Well what a botch-up. That guy over there and the Minister for State Owned Enterprises will go down as the most useless feeble and negligent Ministers and shareholding Ministers of State-owned enterprises. They over-egged the pudding with Mighty River Power. They were greedy. They wanted more money—10 percent down on the price. Then of course we had free shares in respect of Meridian and a set of steak knives thrown in.All the time they were trying desperately to get the sale of these State-owned enterprises off the ground. That was not because they wanted to maximise the returns to shareholders—they are not the shareholders; the taxpayers are. They have to sell these State-owned enterprises simply because it is the Prime Minister’s political vanity and political pride on the line. If he was still working for Merrill Lynch the Prime Minister would tell his shareholders not to sell and that it was not the right time—no time is actually the right time—to maximise shareholders’ returns.So now it comes down to it. “Brown Bag Banks” is up on fraud charges propping the Government up. He is propping the Government up. That is what it is down to: the rotten pile from Epsom propping the Deputy Prime Minister up. Well I hope that over there they are all very proud of themselves.