Henare Tau: General Debate 
Henare Tau: General Debate 
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Hon TAU HENARE (National) 
: 
 Just for the sake of the leader of New Zealand First’s historical record I point out that on 29 June 1990 Sir Michael Fay was knighted by the then Labour Government. The question I ask is: why the hell after all these years would that member back a Labour Government? Why would he back a Labour Government when it was the one that gave Michael Fay his knighthood? 
Rt Hon Winston Peters 
: You don’t know a darned thing about it. Sit down. 
Hon TAU HENARE 
: He tells me to sit down but never mind that—it is called déjà vu. We have been there we have done that we have bought the T-shirt and let us move on. Twenty million dollars—well we got that from Michael Fay and David Richwhite as well. 
I will talk about interest rates for a moment— 
Jill Pettis 
: Oh how generous. 
Hon TAU HENARE 
: —while she parks the broom where it should be parked. Very shortly hard-working New Zealanders will be hit by their new mortgage payments which will go through the roof. This Government is responsible for hurting those in “Strugglers’ Gully”—those on “Battle Street”. What has made interest rates rise as quickly and as high as they have done? Darren Hughes laughs. I was at a dinner the other night with his friend John Tamihere—yes that one—who mentioned a little name “tug-muscle” regarding Darren Hughes Clayton Cosgrove and all sorts of people from the Labour Party. It is no wonder he is not in the House today and he most probably will not be ever again. 
Among the things that send interest rates skyrocketing is Government spending. The issue is not so much the actual spending; it is the quality of that spending. Let us look at some of the quality of the spending this Government has either earmarked in the Budget or made over the last 6 years. In Te Puni Kokiri the Ministry of Maori Development millions of dollars have gone into contracts. But what do we find from the Auditor-General? He looked into that spending and found no monitoring whatsoever of any of the contracts. There was no monitoring whatsoever of millions and millions of dollars of Government money—taxpayers’ money actually. 
The Auditor-General made 16 recommendations to the Ministry of Maori Development and so far only eight of them have been put in place. The other eight Te Puni Kokiri is working on. How can it continue to work on recommendations from the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General? I will say this. It is a situation of poor management poor decisions poor spending choices and poor leadership by the Minister of Maori Affairs by the Prime Minister and by those who continue to prop up a dying stinking rotting Government. They will go the way of that Government on the other side of the House. 
I am talking about New Zealand Trade and Enterprise Te Puni Kokiri and the “Get Checked” Diabetes Aotearoa health programme. There we have $12 billion of Government money going into the Ministry of Health and still it does not know what the outcomes are. In terms of the “Get Checked” Diabetes Aotearoa programme for diabetes no one on the Government side of this House can tell us when we ask how many people in this country suffer from that debilitating disease. Government members cannot tell us how many people are on that list. So how can the Government pour good money after bad in trying to fix a problem when it does not even know how many people are on that list? 
I could go on all day and I am sure the House wants me to. Then there is “free for a fee” early childhood education. We got 20 hours free all right but the poor mums and dads in “Strugglers’ Gully” were told it is free for a fee. It is the biggest hoax that has been perpetrated on parents on mums and dads since 1935 when Labour was first elected. 
I say that there is a way out for the Government and that is to feel the fear. Government members have to feel the fear and they have to embrace that fear because what they will do then is to wave ta-ta to the Treasury benches.