Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:632;Page:4135] 
Estimates Debate 
In Committee 
The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley) 
: The Standing Orders provide for 8 hours of debate on the estimates contained in the Appropriation (2006/07 Estimates) Bill. Each member may have no more than two speeches of 5 minutes on each vote. The estimates debate should be relevant to the Government’s current spending plans as contained in the Estimates of Appropriations. As each vote is reached a question will be put that that vote stand part. If it is the wish of the Committee I will put the question on groups of votes by Minister until a vote is reached that members seek to debate. A separate question on this vote will then be proposed from the Chair. 
Vote Office of the Clerk agreed to.  
Vote Parliamentary Service agreed to.  
Vote Audit agreed to.  
Vote Ombudsmen agreed to.  
Vote Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment agreed to.  
Vote Arts Culture and Heritage agreed to.  
Vote Communications Security and Intelligence agreed to.  
Vote Ministerial Services agreed to.  
Vote Prime Minister and Cabinet 
Dr the Hon LOCKWOOD SMITH (Deputy Chairperson of the Finance and Expenditure Committee) 
: 
 I hope the Minister in the chair Michael Cullen will be able to answer some of the questions I wish to raise with him. When the Finance and Expenditure Committee examined the estimates of Vote Prime Minister and Cabinet we noted that a bid had been made for an additional $200000 and that one of the reasons for that bid for additional money was the cost of the Taito Phillip Field inquiry. We noted that the Prime Minister had gone to the Cabinet business committee back in January with a bid for additional funding and had explained in the paper for the committee that the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet had faced legal costs in the  
Prime Minister  
v 
 Doone 
 court case—that was the former Commissioner of Police whom the Prime Minister shafted—of $15000 and at that stage the Taito Phillip Field inquiry costs were $119000. 
When the select committee sought information as to what the costs were as the inquiry wore on we were denied that information. The head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet refused to advise the committee which I found quite an extraordinary turn of events. He finally said he would consider providing the select committee with the information but that “clearly of course I’ll have to consult the Prime Minister.” There are some questions we need to ask about this Field inquiry because clearly money in this year’s estimates is being spent on it as the report is released today during this financial year. I do not know whether the Prime Minister feels that we have value for money in this report. I would like the Prime Minister to respond to some of these issues. 
When Noel Ingram said in relation to some key issues in his report that he has been unable to resolve the matters—for example he said: “If the allegations in relation to further Thai labour on Mr Field’s house in Samoa are to be resolved it would be necessary for an authority with appropriate powers of investigation to inquire further.”—I want to know from the Prime Minister whether she accepts that whether she thinks the allegations simply do not matter or whether she accepts Noel Ingram QC’s advice that there needs to be a more powerful inquiry if those matters are to be resolved. Noel Ingram went on further to say that he could not resolve the issues surrounding the painting by he believes Thai immigrants of Mr Field’s house at 51 Church Street in Otahuhu. In relation to those issues he said: “I have been unable to establish who undertook the interior painting of 51 Church Street”. It is relevant because Thai immigrants may have done that work in response to immigration services offered by Taito Phillip Field. Noel Ingram went on to say that he is “concerned by the unsatisfactory nature of the explanations provided by Mr Field in relation to that painting.” If the Prime Minister is spending money from this year’s estimates on the report I want to know whether she is satisfied with it whether she thinks it resolves these issues and whether Noel Ingram’s saying that he cannot establish who did the work on the house and that he finds Taito Phillip Field’s explanations unsatisfactory resolves the issues. 
Furthermore I want to hear from the Prime Minister in relation to a certain meeting that took place on 2 October at the home of Mrs Thaivichit and the allegation that the meeting which was called shortly after the establishment of this inquiry may have involved trying to orchestrate what these people—key witnesses involved in these allegations—might say to the inquiry. There was such concern about this meeting that the fact that it occurred was leaked to the police and the Serious Fraud Office was involved in issues around it. Noel Ingram said that his investigation into the matter was unsatisfactory “because five of the people allegedly present at that gathering on 2 October 2005 declined to be interviewed by me in relation to that matter.” So I want to know from the Prime Minister whether that issue is resolved. Was there an attempt to pervert the course of justice or at least pervert the course of this inquiry given that these people—key witnesses—met immediately after the announcement of the inquiry and subsequently refused to talk to the inquiry? What went on at that meeting? Noel Ingram was unable to establish what went on at that meeting. I want the Prime Minister to tell this House whether she thinks those issues are resolved by this report. Is she going to allow this whitewash? 
I want to finish talking about these issues that I want the Prime Minister to respond to because they are serious. I know the Prime Minister is not in the chair; the Deputy Prime Minister is and he will probably not be as familiar with these issues as the Prime Minister is because she established this inquiry. The reason why it is important is that we are spending a lot of money on it. I understand that the Government has announced almost half a million dollars has been spent on this inquiry. I want to know from the Prime Minister whether she is satisfied with these elements. I want to run over them again so there can be no doubt about what I am asking the Prime Minister. 
The first one is about the four people who worked on Phillip Field’s house in Samoa. All four of them are key witnesses as to what went on involving their doing that work for Taito Phillip Field in response to his assisting them with immigration issues. The fact that all four of them refused to be interviewed by Noel Ingram refused to tell the inquiry what went on automatically leads to the ongoing allegation of corruption. Obviously they did not want to talk to the inquiry because what went on was corrupt practice. That is why they did not want to talk to the inquiry. I want to hear from the Prime Minister whether she believes that Noel Ingram’s saying that he could not take that matter any further and could not resolve those issues is satisfactory and whether that is the low standard she now accepts from inquiries. I guess when she is involved in things like “paintergate” and the knifing in the back of Commissioner of Police Peter Doone when she pretended she had not and when in fact the documents show her department had to spend $15000 on legal fees in relation to it maybe that is Helen Clark’s personal standard as Prime Minister. 
I want to know whether her standard as Prime Minister is to say that it is the end of the matter when one of the key issues is around the use of immigrant labour—people whom Taito Phillip Field had helped with immigration issues—and what work they did on his four houses in New Zealand especially the one at 51 Church Street. Noel Ingram was unable to find out what went on because first the people involved refused to talk to him and second Taito Phillip Field continued to mislead him as to what went on. Noel Ingram said in as many words that he did not believe Taito Phillip Field’s explanations. Is the Prime Minister happy with that? Is that the standard she now accepts from inquiries of this nature? Does she simply accept that it is the end of the matter when the Queen’s Counsel has said he could not resolve the issue because the people refused to be interviewed. 
In respect of the meeting that took place on 2 October just a few days after this inquiry was launched when five of those key people—the Thai immigrants involved—refused to talk to the inquiry I want to know from the Prime Minister whether she thinks that is perfectly OK. Does she think that the fact that Noel Ingram said: “My investigation into that matter has been unsatisfactory”—he did not say it was incomplete; he said it was unsatisfactory because five of the people refused to talk to him—is the end of the matter from her perspective? It is not Noel Ingram’s fault—let me make it very clear. I am not saying Noel Ingram’s work is of a low standard—let me be very clear. The issue is whether this Government accepts the inability of Noel Ingram to resolve these issues as an excuse to say that the allegations against Taito Phillip Field had no substance. Because the Queen’s Counsel could not resolve the issues does that mean she now simply says they did not happen? That is the low standard—the Prime Minister saying it is all OK because the Queen’s Counsel could not resolve them. 
Throughout the report Dr Ingram referred to his lack of powers to resolve the allegations. If the Prime Minister now sits back and says: “That’s fine. We’ve spent half a million dollars on this. It clears Taito Phillip Field.” and thinks that is the end of the matter it is not. People who have spoken to me who have been directly involved in issues with Taito Phillip Field have also refused to talk to the Ingram inquiry and some of their personal allegations on issues they have personally been involved in involving payments by them personally are not covered in that report. If the Prime Minister thinks that this is the end of the matter it is not. 
RUSSELL FAIRBROTHER (Labour) 
: 
 I listened to the previous speaker Lockwood Smith with some amazement and interest. Clearly he has not had a chance to read the report because making allegations that the inquiry by Noel Ingram QC was unsatisfactory goes against exactly what Dr Ingram has said. I refer the member to the opening paragraphs of the report particularly those in which Dr Ingram summarises the inquiry. At paragraph 12 on page 5 he notes: “Even if I had possessed the power to administer oaths and to compel the attendance of witnesses and the production of documents the process of inquiry may not have been significantly more satisfactory.” He goes on to point out that in fact he effectively had the power of a commission of inquiry because all the Government officials Ministers of the Crown and the like cooperated fully in the manner in which Sir Geoffrey Palmer outlined in his book  
Unbridled Power 
. In fact the inquiry was so extensive that the interviews extended to 700 pages 300000 words and 11 volumes of documents. One could not have a more thorough investigation. 
It is quite untrue for the member Lockwood Smith to allege that Dr Ingram did not believe Taito Phillip Field. Dr Ingram notes that Mr Field was cooperative throughout the inquiry and assisted as much as he could. At paragraph 191 Dr Ingram states: “However determining when Mr Field became aware that Mr Siriwan was working on the house is more difficult.” Of course that statement weighs an allegation against Taito Phillip Field’s evidence and the shortage of anything else to back up Mr Field or to rebut the allegation simply says that there is no evidence to confirm that allegation or to rebut it. One cannot say that that causes Mr Field to be a liar. The report simply states that although Mr Field’s explanation was “sparse” in areas—and we are talking about events involving 400 immigration inquiries by Mr Field in 1 year—there is no evidence to call him untruthful. Equally Mr Field has been deprived of evidence to back up what he says is correct. 
So the conclusion of the inquiry is that it was a very satisfactory inquiry. There is no evidence to doubt what Mr Field says. The overall conclusion is that we have a member of Parliament who works very hard and very diligently and who cooperated fully with the inquiry—including at one stage when Mr Field was not represented by counsel and Dr Ingram suggested he get further counsel so that Dr Ingram could be satisfied that the inquiry was as fulsome as it should be. So a Queen’s Counsel signed off by stating that he was very pleased with the report that the report was thorough and had been thoroughly checked and that the report was as substantial and fair as he would have hoped it to be. So to put out the fact that there was no power to compel is to suggest that Dr Ingram lacked the knowledge of how to get the power to compel. A simple request to the Prime Minister at the early stage to vary the inquiry in order to give the power to compel may have answered that. But of course Dr Ingram answers that himself by noting in the report that having the power to compel would not have much enhanced the inquiry in any event. 
So what we have is simply a thorough report by a very experienced Queen’s Counsel that upholds the integrity of Taito Phillip Field. Taito Phillip Field is a hard-working member and Dr Ingrams notesthat at times to rely on memory can be difficult. Mr Field himself has been deprived of access to information that would corroborate his memory but that is not the same as saying that Mr Field has misled the inquiry or is corrupt. It is very easy in the House to make allegations of corruption; it is very difficult to disprove them. This is an inquiry that lasted for 10 months and had 700 pages of interviews 300000 words and 11 volumes of documents. Mr Field was complimented on his cooperation. It is a long bow to draw from that any suggestion of dishonesty or scurrilous behaviour. This is a report that Mr Field can wave around as a tribute to his integrity and it suggests he will continue to be a profitable and good member of the House. 
JOHN KEY (National—Helensville) 
: 
 The previous speaker spent his career as a court lawyer representing some people who I suspect he knew in his heart were as guilty as sin. He may well be able to choose selective parts of a report and convince even a jury or a court that he is correct. But in the court of public opinion there will be only one response to the report from Dr Ingram which is that Mr Field and this report have left more questions unanswered than answered and that New Zealand and its Parliament have somehow had their reputation tarnished today. 
One of the interesting things about New Zealand when one goes and looks at things like the world freedom index or the world competitiveness index is that one sees they ask a simple question in those reports. It goes like this: “Is the country in question a country that is known for corruption? Many of the countries around the world—in parts of Asia and Europe—are known for deep corruption and it is not possible to have things occur in the normal course of events unless payments are made in the most innovative exciting and interesting ways. New Zealand is a country that always scores well in that respect. New Zealand is a country that has had a long and deep history of not having corruption in its Parliament. 
So I wonder what the people who will fill out those reports on New Zealand’s history will think when they find in Dr Ingram’s report the matter of a simple meeting that was held by Mr Field and by four or five other people who refused to talk to the Ingram inquiry—people who clearly were afraid to say to Dr Ingram the things they were told. I wonder what Mr Cole will have to say when he received a phone call from Mr Field after having gone to the media and was told that he and his son should “back off”? 
I wonder what the skilled people who were seeking immigration services from Mr Taito Phillip Field thought when a member of the New Zealand Parliament a Minister in Helen Clark’s Government asked them to do some private work in his house in Samoa for no money? The “Samoan solution” as it will be long remembered is a solution that went this way: “If you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” or “If you come to my office and help me I will help you if you come and do some work for me.” Why would a Thai immigrant who for years had been seeking to get immigration status in New Zealand go to Taito Phillip Field’s office and then agree to go for at least 3 months and work for nothing in Samoa if it were not for the chance of obtaining free immigration into New Zealand? Would the person have done that for Mr Phillip Field’s neighbour who is not a member of Parliament? I think not. 
The Prime Minister knows that her department has spent $479000 on a report that has left far more questions unanswered than answered. Now the Prime Minister tells us in the House today that the Opposition is being ludicrous when it wants to see value for money. Well the Minister of Finance who is in the chair—and he is the Deputy Prime Minister—knows that he has thrown about $4 billion or $5 billion more into the health system than previously and has not received a lot of answers for that. He is deeply frustrated. So when the Prime Minister spends $479000 and comes up with a report that has left more questions unanswered than answered the Minister of Finance rightfully laughs that off because he knows that is actually cheap relative to the $4 billion he is getting no answers for in the health sector. 
One of the interesting questions about this whole report is that for $479000 it has taken an awfully long time to surface. Why is that? Why for what Mr Fairbrother and the Prime Minister want us to believe is a pretty simple situation where there was a judgment issue was there such a long period of time before the report surfaced? One conclusion is that it took Dr Ingram as long as that to find answers. The report is full of references to people who did not want to answer Dr Ingram’s questions. They did not want to give him answers and Dr Ingram was very frustrated about that. In fact despite the assurances that the fine defence lawyer Mr Fairbrother put up just a few minutes ago about how Dr Ingram thought that everything was tickety-boo when it came to Taito Phillip Field in paragraph 497 of the report Dr Ingram wrote: “… I am concerned by the unsatisfactory nature of the explanations provided by Mr Field in relation to that painting.” Actually I suspect that Dr Ingram is deeply concerned about his inability to get the answers to some simple questions. 
Why did this report which cost $479000 take so long? It is not because it was difficult to answer the questions. Dr Ingram would have known right back about 8 months ago that he would not receive satisfactory answers from people who knew that they had gone to a member of Parliament and had undertaken some services for which they hoped they would receive special treatment. That was why they went to that member of Parliament. They were not about to implicate themselves further in that sinister event. No the reason the report took 9 months is that this Government has a very narrow majority. This Government relies on Taito Phillip Field staying with the Labour Party. This was a political solution to what is otherwise a new low in benchmarks being set by a Prime Minister who I thought had hit some pretty big lows prior to the release of this report. 
One can only draw the conclusion that Mr Fairbrother may think the $479000 report would stack up in a New Zealand court. He may think on a technicality that it passes. He may think that through some obscure part of some legislation it stacks up. But I am here to tell members that when the people of New Zealand see this matter reported on television tonight—when people find out that the five people who were in a meeting with Taito Phillip Field received a phone call from him telling them to back off that they were not there to answer Dr Ingram’s questions that they worked for a member of Parliament for nothing and that they undertook a great deal of activity for no good reason—in the court of public opinion there will be only one conclusion. It is that the Prime Minister of New Zealand has wasted her $479000 that Taito Phillip Field has set a new standard—which the Prime Minister has endorsed and which is now a new standard for her Government—and that Taito Phillip Field is guilty as charged. 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Minister of Finance) 
: 
 It is clear that this is audition afternoon for challengers to the leadership of the National Party. They are sort of bobbing up one after the other and coming behind is the wee puppy dog who always votes for the incoming leader and is the first to go and do nasty things outside the kennel as soon as things start going wrong—Mr Murray McCully. But what an interesting disposition that was from Mr Key. It was shallow as always but it asked a very simple question from a National Party perspective. “Damn the rule of law” he said “you can be found innocent in a court of law but we are going to find you guilty.” That was the National Party speech. That was the National Party’s notion of the rule of law. 
Hon Bill English 
: It wasn’t in a court of law. 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN 
: That is what he said. What he said was that it is all very well that the member might be found innocent in a court of law but he will be found guilty in the court of public opinion. What a wonderful approach from that member—the member who could not work out where he lived for the purposes of the electoral roll and wants to rely on the court of public opinion pretending he lived in one place when he lived in another! He was the member who said he did not own a house in Sydney and hours later had to admit that his wife owned the house in Sydney. That was a technicality to get off in a court of law if ever I heard one when it comes to issues of property within the family. 
And then he asked questions like: “Why would anyone go to Taito Phillip Field’s office on an immigration case?”. Gee that is a sinister-sounding question! In fact he said it was a “sinister event” to go to Phillip Field’s office on an immigration case. Phillip Field handles more immigration cases than probably the whole of the National caucus put together. Why? Because he works hard—unlike that lazy shallow member—on behalf of his constituents. That member is a man who does not want in his electorate the kinds of people who might have immigration cases. He is opposed to the building of State houses in his electorate because he might get those kinds of people living there. He does not want those coming through his electorate office door. He does not want those kinds of people sort of befouling the nice little atmosphere he has of the wealthy and the privileged that he runs in that office. It is kind of a branch of Merrill Lynch somewhere in the Auckland area because that is his notion of what an electorate office is meant to be. 
Why did that person go to Samoa? Well it was for the very simple reason that he was an overstayer. He had to get out of the country to apply for permission to be here because if he did not go he would not be able to stay. It is as simple as that. And he did not agree to do things on the house—the member should read the report again. He offered in the end to do the work. But of course the National Party would not understand that kind of thing either because nobody on that front bench offers to do any work except to be the last person to plunge the knife in the back of their current leader. That is those members’ notion of work. 
Then the member asked whether it was not awful for anybody to receive any kind of money. Well yes I agree. But from a party that took $1.2 million in advertising expenses and I think a $500000 donation from the Exclusive Brethren suddenly they are all incredibly— 
Hon Member 
: What a load of rubbish! 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN 
: Well that was $1.2 million of advertising expenses from people who claimed they would not vote and some of whom actually appear on the electoral roll as voting at the last election. Those members are very quiet now are they not! This is such a pure National Party on matters of cash matters of support and matters of being open and honest within Parliament and within the public arena! It is no wonder the court of public opinion has spoken—National members are going down and the Labour Party is going up. 
Hon MURRAY McCULLY (National—East Coast Bays) 
: 
 I was one of those who served on the Finance and Expenditure Committee which heard the estimate from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and I was present when my colleague Dr Lockwood Smith asked the head of the department Mr Wevers about the report that has been released today. Dr Cullen no doubt thinks that he is being enormously clever dancing around on the head of a pin and I simply say to him that grave questions have been raised in relation to the report. If he wants to make light of them that is his call but I can assure him that is not the approach members of the public will take and it does him no credit. 
I ask whether officials from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet have reflected any credit on themselves in this exercise and whether Dr Ingram was in fact wise to have proceeded in the face of the obstacles that the report correctly identifies. In the select committee I was staggered when my colleague Dr Smith asked Mr Wevers what was happening with the report and how much money it had cost taxpayers to date and he said that he did not know. Well I suppose that is an act of sloppiness to some extent but when Dr Smith asked the next obvious question as to whether Mr Wevers could find out and tell the select committee by way of a note Mr Wevers would not say yes to that.  
 I want to record in this debate that that is not a good enough standard of compliance and accountability for the head of a major department of State. Mr Wevers knew precisely what was going on in relation to the inquiry. He was responsible for superintending the activities of Dr Ingram and ensuring the bills were paid. Asked a straight-out question by Dr Lockwood Smith not only did he not know the answer but also he gave no indication that he was prepared to get that answer. I say to Mr Wevers that that is not good enough. It is not good enough when the Finance and Expenditure Committee which superintends this estimate asked him a straight question to which he could have supplied a straight answer. 
But today we know why Mr Wevers was wriggling around on a hook and why Dr Ingram has been so slow with his report. It is because members of the public and members of the House wanted answers to some straight questions and Dr Ingram could not answer them. Dr Ingram came back with a report to the Prime Minister that said he did not know the answers in respect of the truly large questions that had been posed. I feel some sympathy for Dr Ingram because I guess he felt that as a man who had taken on a job he needed to try to see it through. But I am bound to say having seen the report—and I have had a quick look at it today—that I think that was the wrong call. 
I think Dr Ingram like Mr Wevers fell short of his obligations in this respect and that on balance—Dr Ingram might even agree with this himself—he probably should have said that if the witnesses would not talk and the Government would not do the things that would make the witnesses feel able to talk then he could not produce a report he was prepared to put his name to. That would have been the better outcome from Dr Ingram’s point of view it would have been a more honest outcome as far as the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet was concerned and it would at least have left us more overtly in a situation where the Prime Minister needed to do what she should have done in the first place: set up an inquiry with the appropriate powers to compel those who had the answers to the questions—those who knew the truth behind the allegations—to go along and answer the questions. 
Today’s report solves nothing; it tells us nothing; it vindicates no one. It simply leaves a great stench hanging around that sometime over the next few weeks someone will have to do something to resolve because members of the public and the news media who report to the public are not convinced for one minute about the veracity fullness and completeness of the report that has been released today—and nor should they be. 
I am sad that the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet has allowed itself to be misused in this way. I want to say to Dr Ingram that I feel some sympathy for him in this respect but I think he has acted unwisely in allowing his name to be associated with a report that leaves these important matters hanging still to be resolved. In the context of Parliament I think this is a sad day for all of us and one that the Prime Minister in due course will come to regret. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 We ought not to lose sight of the fundamental facts of the matter we are debating as part of the debate on the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet estimates. The facts are these. A member of Parliament provided assistance to some constituents—as we all should every day when we can. At the same time a number of those constituents carried out tasks for him that amounted to a substantial gift—at the same time. The report on this matter as my colleague says does not answer the basic questions as to whether that member of Parliament required those gifts in return for that assistance and it does not answer a whole lot of other questions because the Queen’s Counsel heading the inquiry could not compel witnesses to answer questions. 
Now that the Prime Minister is in the chair I want to ask her whether she endorses this behaviour. Is it now the standard of public life in New Zealand that if we help constituents we can should or may expect to get away with their providing a great deal of financial assistance to us? Is that the new standard? And is the description of that now “an error of judgment”? An error of judgment in my constituency office is when my electorate secretary does not treat the local Grey Power president with respect. An error of judgment is when a letter is a week late. It is not just an error of judgment if six people turn up to paint the outside of my house because I got them immigration status—and it does need painting right now and it will be a very expensive job. What would the Labour Party and the Prime Minister say if I turned up in the House to defend a situation like that where six people painted my house after I got them immigration status? I ask the Prime Minister to answer here today whether she endorses the behaviour of Taito Phillip Field as laid out in the report of Noel Ingram QC. 
Then I ask her this question—[ 
Interruption 
] No the member should listen—the Prime Minister needs to hear this question so that she can answer it. What are the consequences for Taito Phillip Field of today’s findings? She cannot say that he loses his job as a Minister because he lost that 9 months ago. Was he sacked then or has he been sacked today—which is it? Or are there no consequences? Does the Prime Minister buy the line that Taito Phillip Field has been totally exonerated and needs only an interview with the member who almost lost Otaki and that is that—or works it through with the Labour whips or whatever they have called the punishment. Well it would be punishment; having morning tea with them would be hard work. 
Was Taito Phillip Field sacked? Have these findings had any consequences for him? If not then the boundaries of public life in New Zealand have shifted enormously because until today no one knew the scale and extent of what went on around those immigration applications. Now we do. If the test is the reality or the appearance of conflict of interest—then that absolutely is the appearance. No one not even a Prime Minister desperate to keep her majority can deny the appearance of a fundamental conflict of interest whereby a member of Parliament received significant financial benefit and at the same time helped the constituents from whom he received it. 
So Helen Clark needs to answer those questions. Does she endorse this behaviour? Has Taito Phillip Field been sacked or not? What are the consequences for Taito Phillip Field of today’s findings? And does the Prime Minister believe that this is now the appropriate standard by which members of Parliament run their public lives? 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That Vote Prime Minister and Cabinet be agreed to 
. 
Ayes 61 
New Zealand Labour 50; New Zealand First 7; United Future 3; Progressive 1. 
Noes 50 
New Zealand National 48; ACT New Zealand 2. 
Abstentions 6 
Green Party 6. 
Vote Prime Minister and Cabinet agreed to. 
Vote Security Intelligence agreed to.  
Vote Attorney-General agreed to.  
Vote Finance 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 I am wondering why in the Treasury estimates the Government pays for its policy advice because it certainly does not take any. I will give just one example. A couple of years ago the Minister of Education on the prompting of Treasury initiated a value-for-money review. I have had the privilege as Opposition spokesman on education of spending the last 6 months trying to track down exactly what happened in the value-for-money review. Yesterday I finally got the conclusive letter from the Minister of Education who said that he was not going to give me any of the pieces of paper because he regarded it as “ongoing work”. 
Parliament is appropriating millions of dollars to fund policy advice from Treasury. In every major expenditure area that Treasury advice is questioning the value of the spending of taxpayers’ dollars because Treasury officials see more evidence of the waste than we do. In just the last week we have had a report on law and order showing the extent of the cost and the feebleness of the Government’s efforts to deal with it. Treasury has raised fundamental issues about the lack of productivity growth in the health system. The patients have not had all the extra money; the system has all the extra money and does not have much else to show for it. In education the Government has clearly turned itself inside out with concern about the enormous waste that has gone on in the tertiary sector. So why does the Government keep paying for policy advice—not all of which is accurate but most of which is sound—that it never takes? 
Dr Cullen has managed to persuade himself if no one else that he is what he calls a “fiscal conservative”. I guess in the Labour Cabinet he is a fiscal conservative in that he has an interest in at least counting the money as it flows out. Other Ministers like Steve Maharey do not even care about counting it and that became quite clear in the tertiary education debacle last year. So in that sense Dr Cullen is conservative; he likes to count the money. But he has done almost nothing about establishing value for taxpayers’ dollars. We will see time and time again endless examples from the Opposition where clearly there has been no focus on value. 
I will give another example from the education sector. Five years ago the tertiary education system cost $40 million to run. That sounds like a lot of money and it is. It is a lot of student allowances a lot of operations and a lot of extra students who could be at university. There was $40 million spent to run the Wellington machine to oversee the tertiary education system. Five years later it costs $140 million to run the tertiary education system—an extra $100 million. That number has so many zeros that most people cannot imagine it. Five years ago it cost $40 million today it costs an extra $100 million so it now costs $140 million to run the tertiary education system—and it is worse. Its institutions are in worse shape its revenue outlook is in worse shape but a few bits of it are working better. 
The Minister in the chair Mita Ririnui should tell us why we are paying for that advice. He should also tell us Treasury’s response to the Ministry of Social Development social report. Any Government can fail according to the yardstick of its opponents but once a Government fails according to its own yardstick it is in serious trouble. There is no doubt that the Labour Party meant what it said back in 1999 and 2000—that is that it would bring in a range of policies to deal with inequality of incomes across New Zealand. In fact it was one of the major themes of its 1999 election campaign. But the Ministry of Social Development report from a Government agency has said that things have become worse for the very groups that Labour targeted saying they should get better. There was $934 million spent on the closing the gaps programmes. The Government changed the name but it did not take the money back. It has now spent the $934 million and it is stuck with the verdict of its own social agency—whose analysis I would have to say is patchy at best but sometimes useful—that inequality has become worse. The Government will talk about Working for Families as being the best way— 
CRAIG FOSS (National—Tukituki) 
: 
 I rise to speak to Vote Finance which is allocated $52.8 million. Further to what Mr English has just pointed out about policy advice I say $2.7 million of that $52.8 million is for policy advice about the management and ownership of State-owned enterprises. I think that taxpayers deserve an explanation of that because Mr Mallard totally ignores that $2.7 million for policy advice and totally bulldozes any suggestion that is outside his own preferences. An amount of $2.3 million is allocated for policy advice on various taxes. Mr Cullen the Minister of Finance calls that an ideological burp. He totally ignores it totally bulldozes it and gives us one of his witticisms to explain why that should be ignored. We can point to about 10 percent of the $52 million that should be savings for taxpayers. I am a big fan of Treasury but if the current administration totally ignores its advice let us put it out to pasture. Let us save 10 percent. That is probably the next lot of waste we will see on wastewatch.co.nz—the National Party’s new site that will highlight much of this Government’s wastage. 
I think it is very important to look at the environment in which we are asked to consider this appropriation. Inflation is now at 4 percent. Inflationary expectations are nudging 4 percent for the next 2 years as a result of waste of being unproductive and of sending money to the squeakiest and loudest wheel as opposed to measuring productive outcomes for the New Zealand taxpayer. Further to that environment growth is struggling to beat even 1 percent over the same 18 months to 2 years. The emerging Asian tigers would be disappointed if they did not get 1 percent growth per quarter. In an environment where New Zealand’s gross average income is less than the Aussie average net income it is no wonder that 640 New Zealanders per week are leaving to go to Australia. This is an environment where for goodness’ sake there is a tax bill before the Finance and Expenditure Committee that will incentivise New Zealanders to invest into our biggest competitor Australia and into the Guinness Peat Group—and it will do that in an environment where New Zealand is struggling to save money. 
As was alluded to earlier the New Zealand living standards reports show that those who are suffering the most from the policies of the current Government and the forecast spending have grown to 17 percent. All we have heard is rhetoric and spin. If we get on the ground and talk amongst the people in the lower socio-economic levels we find they are struggling. The Labour members should absolutely hang their heads in shame at what is happening out there to real New Zealand. 
With regard to the inflation blowout I think it is a good idea to look at the effects of inflation bursting out to 4 percent. What are the dangers of that who will be most at risk and what are some of the effects? Those who will be hit the most are people on fixed incomes—mostly superannuitants who are struggling right now to pay $1.77 per litre for gas when about half of that goes in tax anyway. Those who are struggling on superannuation and on lower incomes will struggle as they try to meet the day-to-day demands to pay for their petrol electricity and simply just fruit and vegetables. 
The blowout in inflation creates a very interesting question as to whether the indexation of the tax brackets will still happen. There is a lot of uncertainty about that. Higher inflation means that more New Zealanders will lurch into the top tax brackets and they will recall the 1999 Labour pledge that only 5 percent of taxpayers would be in the top bracket. Well I think that currently about 16 percent of taxpayers are in that bracket and that will start to move towards 20 percent right now. We will be able to watch the flights to Australia start to fill up even further than at present. The price of oil has been blamed as part of the reason for the consumer price index increase and that is fair enough. That has contributed but the wanton waste the “spend-athon” and the gross overtaxation of New Zealanders by this current administration is absolutely to blame for the current situation. 
Further to the current environment what is another result of inflation bursting out through 4 percent? Today I heard 100 percent mortgages being advertised on the radio. One of the constant claims of the Reserve Bank and the Minister of Finance is that there is over-investment in property. 
R DOUG WOOLERTON (NZ First) 
: 
 In speaking on Vote Finance in the appropriation debate I would just like to say that it does not surprise us in New Zealand First that we have had a blowout in inflation rates. We have long contended that there is a difference between importing and getting monetary wheels turning in that way and exporting which is what we believe should be happening now and should have been happening in past years. New Zealand has simply imported too much and exported too little. 
New Zealand First is one of I think only two parties that believe in incentivising the taxation system. It is good to see that David Skilling who heads a thinktank in Auckland talked about the same thing in yesterday’s  
New Zealand Herald 
. It is an appropriate time given that 2007 is Export Year—a New Zealand First initiative—to talk about those sorts of things. 
In Hamilton we have what we call an innovation park which is for people of a like mind who believe they can add value to mainly dairy exports and dairy commodities and send them overseas. These are the sorts of things we believe should be supported by the Government. They are the sorts of things we believe will get New Zealand out of the exporting hole and they are the sorts of things that will drive up the income level of average New Zealanders—in fact all New Zealanders. It will not be some sort of whizzo greenfields find which people have sought in the past; it will not be some sort of quest for extra production; it will be clever slants on products we already know and already produce. It will be those things that make the difference when it comes to exporting dollars. 
Hon David Carter 
: Dog chips! 
R DOUG WOOLERTON 
: Mr David Carter mentions dog chips. I suggest that he had a dose of that on the brain a wee while ago. In actual fact one of the products in the Waikato Innovation Park is the electronic marking of animals through eartags which will lead to better productivity. Dog chipping is simply an extension of that. It is something that the National Party chose to ignore in the backward-looking step that it took. New Zealand First will tell National members about that in the future because it was a very very old-fashioned stance that they took. 
I shall give members an indication of what happens at the innovation park. A small company has invented a sweetener to replace sugar that has virtually no calories. It is based on a fruit rather like the kiwifruit. Unfortunately we have to get that fruit from China but the company which is based in Hamilton is now exporting something like 25 tonnes of that product to America. It will get the amount up to 100 tonnes in the future and the money from that will go into New Zealand coffers. We would like to say that all of it will but some of it will obviously stay in China where this stuff is manufactured. 
New Zealand First members think all of those things should be done in New Zealand. If we have taxation incentives for our exporters the likes of which they compete against in many other countries and as Mr David Skilling is talking about as New Zealand First has talked about for many years and as will be recognised in the 2007 Export Year we will get the innovative high-value products that will take New Zealand to another level. 
RODNEY HIDE (Leader—ACT) 
: 
 It is good to follow Mr Doug Woolerton. I can only agree with him but I do not think he goes far enough. I agree that we should have tax incentives for exporters but why just exporters? What about tax incentives for workers? What about tax incentives for dairy owners? What about tax incentives for every business in New Zealand? Each and every one of those business people is working hard. Each and every one of those people could do with more money in their pockets. Mr Woolerton’s ideas were so good that he should be in Government. I say that we should have tax incentives for every working person and every business in New Zealand. 
But we are looking at Vote Finance. We could save a great deal of money in New Zealand because we have a Minister of Finance Dr Michael Cullen who knows everything. He actually does not need advice. He knows all about economics and he can grasp everything in a heartbeat. We have a Minister of Finance who does not need evidence or theory because his own ideology tells him everything. 
Michael Cullen knows as a fact that tax cuts do not work. Michael Cullen still believes—he used to teach history and I guess it has just carried on from that faculty—that tax does not matter. He believes that we can have any old tax rate and any size of government—it can be big small or medium—it makes no difference to the functioning of the economy. Michael Cullen illustrates this by saying that he would not work any harder if his taxes were lower. That is his complete grasp of the relationship between size of government tax take Government spending and economic growth. 
Of course Treasury being smart and being made up mostly of economists knows that is complete nonsense that taxes have an enormous effect on whether people choose to invest on whether people choose to be entrepreneurs on whether people choose to work a bit harder and in fact on whether people choose to stay and live in New Zealand. It does not take much of a change in our growth rate to change our fortunes over 5 years 10 years or 15 years. 
Michael Cullen in a speech he gave just this month to the Nelson chamber of commerce warned against tax cuts because tax cuts could give a fiscal stimulus. This was from a man who has overseen an increase in the size of government from 36.1 percent of GDP to a whopping 42.1 percent of GDP—a 16 percent increase; an increase per year of $25000 million. But in Michael Cullen’s world it works like this. He can take money off hard-working New Zealanders he can bring it into Government he can spend it on the most wasteful projects that even a kindergarten could not come up with throw the money against the wall and that is not inflationary. 
But oh boy if he did not take that money in the first place if he left it with a hard-working Kiwi mum or dad if he left it with a small-business person who is up all night filling out GST returns and who is part of the productive sector of New Zealand then those people might spend it on their groceries on some extra education for their kids on employing another person or on an extra plant for their business. To Michael Cullen that would be bad; that would be inflationary. 
So we do not actually need Treasury because we have Michael Cullen as the Minister of Finance and he knows everything about the economy including that tax makes no difference. 
Hon PAUL SWAIN (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 One of the most galling things about this Parliament is having to listen to Rodney Hide criticising the Minister of Finance. Rodney Hide is some sort of second-rate ballroom dancer who cannot hold on to his partner— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: No he’s a wrestler. 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: That is right—he is a wrestler. He has come back to this House finally and eventually after being off doing other far more important things to try to boost the poll ratings of the ACT party— 
Darren Hughes 
: From one to two. 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: Yes and of course doing hopelessly— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: It went from two to one. 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: Yes that is right; it went backwards as a result of his performance. To have Rodney Hide of the ACT party criticising the Minister of Finance is absolutely and utterly galling. 
Of course the ACT party is still chanting the same old mantra which is tax cuts. It is interesting that when we actually analyse the tax cuts that it is talking about we see that they mean roughly a $100 tax cut for Rodney Hide and $10 for the average worker. That is the kind of thing that has happened in Australia. It is the kind of thing that happens to Mr Rodney Hide. Of course he is always the first to come out and say we should have more inquiries into this matter or that matter—costing more money—and do more for roading and the sorts of things he says are holding up Auckland’s development. Yet when he comes into this House he chants the same old mantra about tax cuts that the National Party chants. 
ACT and the National Party have said in the past that they would borrow to fund tax cuts. I heard that during the election campaign. They were not going to spend the surplus on them but were going to borrow to finance them. There was some kind of voodoo arrangement— 
Darren Hughes 
: Getting it from overseas. 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: That is right. They were going to do it not by borrowing but by getting it from overseas. [ 
Interruption 
] That is right—something like that. With smoke and mirrors and a bit of voodoo economics these tax cuts were somehow going to materialise. Of course everyone knew what was going to happen and that is why the National members opposite and the dregs of the ACT party are still sitting over on that side of the House. 
Those parties could never actually bring themselves to say they would sell State assets. They talked about a few farms here and there. Every time they were pushed on State assets they said: “We were going to sell Kiwibank but we’re going to keep it and we were going to sell Landcorp but no we’ll keep it.” They were always going to sell something but when pushed on it they would never define what. They knew that if they actually came out and said what they would sell they would not be electable. No one would support them because everyone had had a gutsful of asset sales. That is something the Labour Government learnt a long time ago and that is the reason we decided— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: We learnt it hard. 
Hon PAUL SWAIN 
: We learnt it very hard in 1990 as I recall. Our caucus went from about 62 down to about 29. That was a lesson we learnt. Clearly the National Party and the ACT party still have not learnt it. 
Of course there is no question in our mind that those members opposite would cut superannuation. Superannuation would be back on the agenda and the stability we have had for the last 6 years would be completely lost. It would be gone. Don Brash talked about not caring who owned the schools. People know what that is code for. It is code for flogging off things like the schools and the hospitals again. 
If we weigh that up against what the current Minister of Finance Michael Cullen has been able to do we see he has been able to salt money away to ensure sure that when the economy goes a bit soft—and we know that that is happening at the moment—we have an automatic stabiliser so that we do not have to wrench on the handbrake which is what National would have had to do if it had carried out those tax cuts. Right about this time those members would have had to be cutting funding for health and education and they would have been saying to the elderly that they would have to do something about superannuation because of the huge tax cuts they needed to fund somehow. 
Michael Cullen has a careful plan which involves economic transformation making sure our Working for Families package is funded properly and building things around our national identity—our film industry and others things—to make sure New Zealanders feel proud again. It is a proper economic programme. But what do we hear from the National Party and the ACT party? We hear the same old tired mantra about tax cuts and flogging off State assets. They are talking about the 1990s. They want to drag New Zealand back kicking and screaming to the 1990s—back from the growth including huge employment growth that New Zealand has had. Most people have forgotten about the 1990s. That period is now like a bad nightmare they had. The National Party is about going backwards; the Labour Government is about going forwards. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That Vote Finance be agreed to. 
Ayes 61 
New Zealand Labour 50; New Zealand First 7; United Future 3; Progressive 1. 
Noes 48 
New Zealand National 48. 
Abstentions 6 
Green Party 6. 
Vote Finance agreed to. 
Vote Parliamentary Counsel agreed to.  
Vote Serious Fraud agreed to.  
Vote Agriculture and Forestry 
Hon DAVID CARTER (Chairperson of the Primary Production Committee) 
: 
 I want to raise two questions in my brief contribution to Vote Agriculture and Forestry and acknowledge that with regards to the Minister Jim Anderton I am also addressing an issue that probably traverses biosecurity. I want to comment on the recent discovery of the varroa bee mite in the South Island and on an incredible report in the Christchurch  
Press 
 yesterday stating that the Minister of Agriculture who is also the Minister for Biosecurity has on his desk a report about the feasibility of whether it is possible to eradicate the varroa bee mite from the South Island. The report went on to state that the Minister was not able to read that report and make a decision because he was embarking on a week-long trip to South America. I want to say to Mr Anderton that the issue of the varroa bee mite is far more important than his jaunt to South America. 
The Government should have learnt from when the varroa bee mite was first discovered in the North Island that we need to act quickly on biosecurity incursions. In that particular case the hapless Marian Hobbs was the Minister for Biosecurity. I believe strongly that there was an opportunity to eradicate the mite from the North Island but for 13 weeks Marian Hobbs kept calling for report after report and by the time the final report came forward 3 months later it was of course too late to do anything. We are probably now getting into the same position with regard to the varroa bee mite in the South Island. Mr Anderton should have stayed in New Zealand had a look at the report and made a decision. There may then have been a chance to eradicate the mite from the South Island. 
Secondly I want to find out from the Minister of Agriculture what is going on with the public access debate in this country. Prior to the last election we had Helen Clark with her agenda saying that Labour was going to open up private property to public access. There was outrage not only from the farmers of New Zealand but from private landowners throughout the country. Helen Clark quickly backtracked on that issue and hid it as we went into the 2005 election. Now with the election over a series of meetings on the access issue is taking place around the country with John Acland John Aspinall Bryce Johnson and other members of the access panel and the debate is alive and well. 
Last week I attended a meeting in Christchurch and though the panel members may well stand there and say there is no risk to private property rights they have no ability to say that because all they are doing is conducting a series of public meetings. The actual agenda still lies in the hands of Helen Clark—and we well know how much respect she has for private property rights; she has no respect for private property rights at all. 
I want the Minister to tell us today what is going on with this debate and what the process will be once the access panel has reported on the meetings it is holding throughout New Zealand. I know what the conclusions will be. There will be a general “touchy-feely” conclusion amongst property owners and those recreationists wanting better access rights. But guaranteeing better access rights to waterways and to the public lands of this country must by necessity impinge on the private property rights of New Zealand landowners. If that is Helen Clark’s agenda if that is Jim Anderton’s agenda if that is Damien O’Connor’s agenda then I ask them to be honest and have a debate and not to hide behind the sham meetings that John Acland is conducting around the country at the moment. 
Those are the questions I raise. New Zealand farmers have had a gutsful of the Labour Government and policies such as “fart-taxes” public access on to their private land and the microchipping of farm dogs. The farmers of New Zealand have won every debate so far. We thought we had the security of knowing the public access debate was off the agenda but we are now very suspicious that Helen Clark has rekindled her agenda and it is back for debate. 
NATHAN GUY (National) 
: 
 It was interesting to see in the last week that the Labour Party has started refreshing its caucus. I am sad to see that Mr Sutton is giving his valedictory speech next week and is to be replaced in early August by another MP. I say this because who now in the Labour Party represents the rural sector. Who on its list actually represents the farmers of New Zealand? Mr O’Connor as we all know is a washed-up tourism operator from the West Coast. Now that Mr Sutton is heading off to greener pastures who has Labour got to represent rural New Zealand? The answer is it has no one. There is no one on the Labour list with rural credentials. That is why the primary sector does not trust this Government. 
Mr Anderton had to go out and buy a pair of gumboots when he got elevated to the portfolios of agriculture and forestry. I will touch on Mr Anderton for a wee while if I may because the rural sector—after the last 9 months—has given up on him. There have been several occasions when he could have shown strong leadership for the primary sector and he has failed. When the Gisborne cropping farmers got badly hit by flooding on two consecutive occasions over Labour weekend last year Mr Anderton said the Government were just formatting policy and he was sorry but the farmers would miss out. Then it came to the microchipping of farm dogs. He worked hard with Federated Farmers. He said one thing and then delivered another way. He let them down. So the rural sector does not trust this Government; it does not trust it one iota. 
Mr Anderton has hit out with a glossy  
Primary News 
 delivered to every rural letterbox but the newsletter does not touch on the core issues. It does not touch on the impact that rates are having on rural people. All the legislation that has been passed in this House is flowing down into local government with no monetary cheque from this Government. So the rural ratepayers are propping up district councils all over the countryside. That is a huge issue for the rural and primary production sector of this country. 
It is also worth touching on the forestry sector. It has given up on Mr Anderton. Talks have broken down and the sector’s relationship with Mr Anderton is in turmoil. That is because this Government—under the Kyoto Protocol agreement that it has signed—wants to rob all the carbon credits from the forestry sector. This is a huge issue for people in the forestry sector. What are we seeing now throughout New Zealand? Very few pine trees are actually being planted. Nurseries have stopped putting them in their pots because they do not know where this industry is heading. This Government is giving very poor signals to those people. On one hand we know climate change is happening and we want to plant more trees. But the Labour Government wants to steal the carbon credits. So forestry is another sector that does not trust Mr Anderton and that relationship is in turmoil. 
I have touched a little on the demands on ratepayers out there in the district councils. Those people are propping up all the legislation being passed through Parliament. The Building Act as a result of leaking buildings costs 1 percent on the general rate. We know there are other issues flowing through from this Government in respect of food safety drinking water standards and the costly long-term council community plan process that is estimated to have cost $100 million. Where does that funding come from? It comes from all the ratepayers throughout New Zealand and is generally being propped up by the rural sector particularly out in the provinces. 
Just recently I was horrified to hear that Mr Mallard was out signalling to State-owned enterprises that they could loosen up a bit spend a bit more and diversify their portfolios. The rural sector is particularly worried about Landcorp. The sector does not want to see the corporation setting up a milk plant and to be in competition with Fonterra. The sector is concerned that Landcorp commands a higher premium than the average cocky can get right now. So I think fundamentally that policy is flawed. State-owned enterprises should stick to the knitting and drive productivity and profits back for the whole of the rural ratepayers for New Zealand. 
Hon DAMIEN O'CONNOR (Minister for Rural Affairs) 
: 
 It is indeed an honour to respond to a few of the accusations that have been made in the Chamber today. I acknowledge Jim Sutton firstly and the role he has played in agriculture for a large number of years and the incredible contribution he has made through this Parliament and the good work that the current Minister Jim Anderton is doing. 
I will answer a couple of questions that have been put up by Mr Carter. I will clarify a couple of things on public access which is an area I am responsible for. There is no agenda there is no time line and John Acland is someone who is respected by the agricultural sector unlike Mr Carter or Mr Guy. John Acland has respect and people do acknowledge him. He has stated quite clearly that he has undertaken a consultation process around the whole country with a huge amount of effort. 
Nathan Guy 
: When’s the deadline? 
Hon DAMIEN O'CONNOR 
: There is no deadline at all. Mr Guy is asking about that. Mr Carter raised the issue of property rights. 
Hon Bill English 
: Quite right. 
Hon DAMIEN O'CONNOR 
: Quite right. He is absolutely right. There are property rights issues involved here—absolutely—private property rights and public property rights. Mr English might understand one of the issues that has come to a head in a couple of the forums. I have been reading very closely about it and occasionally I get a report back; that has been very positive. One issue is the dilemma of unformed legal roads. The fact is that there is quite an amount of public property out there that has been captured by a number farmers at different times and through history they have utilised those unformed legal roads. There is nothing wrong with that but the reality is that the roads are public property. It is one of the dilemmas that I think the Committee will bring back to the Government. 
 It will not be an easy solution and it is not one we have set a time line on but wise farmers—as they have realised in going to the forums—have acknowledged that it is a bit of a dilemma. Perhaps we should sort through it because the harsh reality at the moment is that an unformed legal road provides a right of access for someone in a 4-wheel drive or on a motorbike with a gun or whatever. Of course there are many situations where that would be a real problem for farmers and farmers acknowledge that. I think that for the most part recreationalists also acknowledge that. 
So one of the things that has arisen and on which I think people will come back to the Government and seek assistance on is a resolution that tries to counter on the one hand the private property rights of the individual farmer and on the other hand the public property rights of the taxpayers and ratepayers who own those unformed legal roads. I look forward to the advice from the panel. It does not have an agenda and there is no time line but I think it would help us to resolve that issue. 
In relation to the issue of the varroa mite I have to acknowledge the good work being undertaken at the moment by Biosecurity New Zealand. The discovery in the South Island of the varroa mite is obviously quite a dilemma and something we had hoped to prevent. However it is there and that agency is working very quickly through a process of assessment in order to bring back some advice to the Government. I am sure we will make a quick decision about what to do next—whether that will be eradication or management. I have every faith that we will handle that issue in the best interests of agriculture horticulture and the whole rural sector because beekeeping is about more than just beekeepers. It is in fact about basic biological production throughout this whole country. 
I will finish off by saying I think Mr Guy probably needs to go back to talk to rural constituents to really understand the problem with forestry at the moment. It is facing some fairly big economic challenges which are nothing to do with the whole issue of the Kyoto Protocol—keeping in mind the fact that it was Simon Upton and the National Government who first committed to Kyoto. We are as a nation committed to trying to reduce over time carbon dioxide emissions and some of the gases that unfortunately all indications say are contributing to global warming. 
I would like to clarify one other thing that was raised—that is the question of how many rural advocates are in the Labour Government. I would like to run through a few of them. Parekura Horomia is himself a farmer unlike Mr English or Mr Carter. Mr Ashraf Choudhary is of course a highly respected agricultural engineering scientist and expert and we welcome his contribution. 
Hon David Carter 
: Who? Champagne Charlie? 
Hon DAMIEN O'CONNOR 
: No. I tell Mr Carter that Ashraf Choudhary worked at Massey University so perhaps the member should do his homework. My colleague Pete Hodgson is a vet. That is reasonably rural and agricultural I would have thought but maybe Mr Carter does not know what happens to a cow or a sheep. I would like to say that Mr Parker has been a big contributor through agricultural industries. I am quite happy to say that we in the Labour Government fully understand and advocate for rural agricultural industries; I wish the same could be said of Opposition parties. 
We have had an outstanding year. The dollar has been high and agricultural industries have been challenged but I think they have come through a challenging period and now can be very very optimistic under this Government. The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry has done an outstanding job to help guide them—not to tell them where to go but to guide them when necessary and to step up and help them in situations such as that with the varroa mite. The ministry will give guidance as to how we will move forward. I am very happy with its performance and with where we will head with agriculture and forestry. I acknowledge the outstanding efforts of Jim Sutton in the past and the great efforts of Jim Anderton at present as Ministers of Agriculture. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That Vote Agriculture and Forestry be agreed to. 
Ayes 61 
New Zealand Labour 50; New Zealand First 7; United Future 3; Progressive 1. 
Noes 48 
New Zealand National 48. 
Abstentions 8 
Green Party 6; Maori Party 2. 
Vote Agriculture and Forestry agreed to. 
Vote Biosecurity agreed to.  
Vote Fisheries agreed to.  
Vote Crown Research Institutes 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (National—Port Waikato) 
: 
 Thank you Mr Chairperson for the opportunity to speak on these Budget estimates for 2006-07 regarding the Crown research institutes which are also very much a part of the science portfolio. It is hugely relevant that through the Speech from the Throne last year the Prime Minister one Helen Clark made the comment: “My Government believes that science and innovation are critical to driving our prosperity.” Well as well as that statement a paper has come from the Ministry of Science Research and Technology detailing a range of actions known as Picking up the Pace 
.  
The reality is more like the Labour Government picking up the spin. I see that Minister Maharey has just taken his seat and if ever there is anyone capable of picking up the spin rather than the pace it is none other than Minister Maharey. 
We have seen in the estimates this year certainly in relation to science a sum of $19.397 million for 2006-07. That can be taken in the context of this Labour Government’s general spending. When one looks at what was spent on Working for Families—which is in the order of a billion dollars a year or more and which will only cement-in dependency—and at what was spent on interest-free student loans which again cost about a billion dollars a year then one sees that $19.397 million seems to be extraordinarily meagre especially if we look at this Government’s rhetoric about science. It says firstly that it will pick up the pace and secondly that science and innovation are critical to driving our prosperity. I wonder whether the Minister will actually stand up and tell us what that really means if this Government is serious about science and innovation being critical to driving our prosperity. It seems to me that there is nothing serious about that at all and that the Labour Government’s priorities are in terms of cementing-in welfare dependency when it commits literally billions of dollars of taxpayers’ funds into programmes like Working for Families and interest-free student loans yet puts only a mere $19.397 million into an area that it says is critical to driving our prosperity. 
The other interesting thing about this Labour Government is that it says it has considerably increased the spending on research and development over the last 6 years. But we know as a fact that as a percentage of GDP spending on science has stayed much the same over the last 6 years or has even diminished a little remaining at about 0.54 percent of GDP. The Minister has the temerity to say the Labour Government is going to aim for expenditure of 0.68 percent of GDP but he does not tell us when that will occur. Just as the Labour Government said 6 long years ago that its aim was to raise New Zealand into the upper half of the OECD it is saying in exactly the same way that in science research and development it is going to aim for 0.68 percent GDP of spending without telling us when that will occur. 
There is no question that this Labour Government and the Minister of Research Science and Technology Mr Maharey the “Minister of Spin” is in his actions doing exactly the opposite of his rhetoric. In fact at the select committee it was very interesting to hear the Minister say that all the Crown research institutes are operating well at the present time. One only has to look at their financial performance over the last 5 years to see that they are not doing so. 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY (Minister for Crown Research Institutes) 
: 
 It was interesting listening to the spokesperson for the National Party on research science and technology. One of the things that marks this particular area of work in the House—the constituency obviously is scientists the people who are directly involved in a whole range of activities that run off the back of science and it is a very interesting area of work to be involved in—one of the hallmarks of it during the time I have been in the House is that members have engaged with each other in debate which is rare. We will have Vote Education soon and I am sure the debate will descend into the usual areas but in the area of science I have noticed over the last 15 or 16 years that I have been around here that the debate has tended to be at a fairly high level. People have put up policies and debated what is going on. 
I think Simon Upton and Pete Hodgson had a great relationship around this portfolio and I am certainly looking forward to having that kind of relationship with Dr Hutchison who I think brings real capacity to the portfolio. I look forward to having that kind of debate. Dr Hutchison will have to forgive me if I do not descend into the same things that he did and just get into the actual debate. [ 
Interruption 
] Now let us get into the debate and I am interested in hearing from the member at a later time. I have looked at the National Party website and there is not any National policy at the present time. I am very keen to see the member put up some ideas in the future so that they can be debated as well. I am sure the sector would like that because that has as I say been the nature of the debate over the last little while. 
But let us look at the vote for this year. The member is right. Since this Government has been in place over the last 6 years— 
Hon Bill English 
: Why do you always agree with us? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: I never agree with Mr English. For listeners at home Mr English is calling out from the front seat because he is so keen to agree with the Government and I always think that is quite a nice mark of him. 
The portfolio of research science and technology has enjoyed about a 65 percent increase in funding since we have been here in power. That is because we understand as Dr Hutchison has been pointing out that this area of work is the key driver for a lot of the innovation that will take place in the economy. Therefore what we have been seeking to do is to lift the level of funding. One of the ironies of the whole last little while of course is that although we have been lifting the level of funding by about 65 percent the economy has been growing so fast that we are still trying to get to the OECD level. It is worth remembering that although the Government has set a clear target of 0.68 percent as part of our investment—we will see how we go over the next little while in terms of growth of the economy and so on but that is where we want to be—if members look at the way we invest in science in this country they will see that there are things we need to consider besides taxpayer funding. 
For example we are not very good at getting the private sector to invest in research and development. We still have a real problem with that. That comes down to I think in some cases a cultural issue. New Zealand businesses on the whole do not necessarily see themselves as investing because they are domestically focused. A whole range of businesses make a product and sell it in the New Zealand market which is pretty settled and they do not see the value of trying to innovate all the time because they are not competing on an international stage. Fonterra of course is absolutely committed to research and development. That company spends a lot of money and wants us to spend more and work in partnership with it. But if somebody is producing say clothing or uniforms for a local market that person is not spending time on new fabrics and so on as it just does not seem to be worthwhile. We have to change that culture. We have to get people used to the notion that even if they are in a domestic market they have to be lifting their research and development commitment. 
Secondly of course many firms are very small. We have a huge number of very small firms. People running a 5-person business are busy every day. They are trying to make sure the whole business works. When someone comes along and says “How about innovating your product?” they often literally do not have time and they do not have enough of a profit margin in their business to do that. We have to think of some ways over the next little while to get businesses perhaps working together in clusters so that they have the time and energy—something we have done with apprenticeships to try to punch up the numbers of apprenticeships across the country. If we can get people working in a group way perhaps we can get the small New Zealand businesses to work in a way that coordinates their efforts and they can invest in research and development. 
But that is the other part of the equation. Later this year—part of what we have funded this year—there is to be a commercialisation summit for example. We are working with Business New Zealand. It is going to bring in business and we are going to bring in scientists over a period of a couple of days and there are things we will do leading up to and out of that conference. We have to look at how to get a better relationship between business and scientists so that we can begin to more rapidly commercialise business. 
It comes down to once again some practical things about New Zealand. We are not used to commercialising. We are used to producing science. Even though the reforms back in the 1990s talked about the whole notion of how we would do science we find that we still have 16 years later a culture that does not allow for the easy movement of an idea through to commercialisation. We have to get more used to the way that the US does it and the Singaporeans do it and to move those ideas through and the Government is very committed to doing that. That is why members will see in the expenditure this year that we have more work going into pastoral research. That is the effort we are putting in to try to get started working with Fonterra the dairy industry and the grass-based industries because they need to lift their innovation. That is why we are getting into energy research. That is why we are spending more money on Crown research institute capability. We want those institutes to lift their capacity so that they are able to produce more science and to commercialise that science more rapidly. So we are working with them as well. 
It is why we are doing things such as promoting science in schools. We want to provide a lot more effort to engage young people in science and we want to put more materials into the hands of teachers because we want to encourage young people not necessarily to be scientists but certainly to be science literate so that whatever they might move on to do they take a science background with them and can apply it. 
One will see a very common theme all the way through this funding. The theme is very simply put—that we see science as the driver of innovation. What we need to do is to produce more knowledge in this country. We are a very small producer of new knowledge and we always will be but we do want to produce our own knowledge particularly in the areas that matter to this country. Then we want to get it on a conveyor belt that moves it towards its application. It will not always be of monetary value. It may be that we move to an understanding of living in a diverse society and what kinds of things we need to do to live in that kind of diverse society. But we want to move it through to application. Of course we want to take ideas from overseas as we have traditionally done and apply those in this country in a way that is good for what we do here. So there is a very common theme here. 
I think we as a Parliament should be trying to work together on how we can approach making sure that this innovation system of ours driven by science becomes a characteristic of living in New Zealand. That will be our future this century; producing knowledge and applying knowledge have to become the Kiwi way of doing things. That was not our way of doing things in the last century. In fact a lot of what we did was about avoiding having to produce knowledge and apply it. We did not do that kind of thing enough. 
Hon Bill English 
: Rubbish! 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: Mr English says that is rubbish. It is good that he agrees it is important because that is what we need to do in the future—to make that the characteristic of the way we work. That is what this Budget is about. That is why I think there has been agreement with it across the sector. People can see where we are going. We are doing the right things and I am looking forward to seeing a little bit of policy from the National Party so that we can engage in a little bit of debate in the future. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That Vote Crown Research Institutes be agreed to. 
Ayes 61 
New Zealand Labour 50; New Zealand First 7; United Future 3; Progressive 1. 
Noes 48 
New Zealand National 48. 
Abstentions 8 
Green Party 6; Maori Party 2. 
Vote Crown Research Institutes agreed to. 
Vote Education 
ALLAN PEACHEY (National—Tamaki) 
: 
 There would not be a member of this Parliament who would not agree with the proposition that the greatest gift a community can give to its children is an outstanding education—not just in some of the years that a child is at school but every day of every week of every year. I think we understand that in New Zealand for over 95 percent of our children that means an education provided by the State. In some areas of the country it is 100 percent. The State therefore has a special responsibility—a responsibility that is not being met in this Budget. Too many of our parents and too many of our children do not have sufficient choice as to where they go to school and there is nothing in the Budget that enhances that choice. Too often children are in communities where parents are voting with their feet. Too often increasingly those parents have nowhere to go but to sell up and shift to a community where the school is responsive to the needs and expectations of that community or fork out for private school fees. 
There is nothing in this Budget that addresses that issue. Indeed it must trouble every New Zealander to know that the inclination of the Government and of its bureaucracies and the teacher unions that support it all too often is to be prepared to support those schools in which parents have lost confidence. It is time we addressed that balance. It is time we recognised the critical importance of the early years at school. For year after year we have paid lip-service to that yet we are still talking about the number of children who are not learning to read write or do mathematics. We seem to stubbornly refuse to get to grips with the basic problem. 
The problem as I see it is that there is a group of children who through no fault of their own will learn only if the methodologies by which they are taught are compatible with their learning styles. Yet too often we find such children stranded in a school that will not acknowledge that that wants to treat all children the same—one size fits all—and just make the best of it instead of our being prepared to begin to get to grips with some of these very serious issues that are of concern to parents out there. 
Those members of the Government who confine themselves to listening to the teacher unions that keep them in office are not getting that message. Schooling is not just about teaching. Of course teaching is important—and we pay lip-service to that all the time. I want to acknowledge the outstanding work being done by thousands and thousands of teachers quietly in their classrooms every day but that must not obscure the fact that for some children—too many children—the quality of teaching and the values and standards in schools that they need are not being provided sufficiently well by the State. There is nothing in this Budget that recognises that teaching has changed that teaching more than ever is a knowledge profession. More than ever teachers have to be good at what they are teaching. We should never lose sight of that. That is especially important in the critical areas of literacy mathematics and science. In addition they have to be good at teaching. Too often we are prepared to separate those two issues out and get into debates about the relative merits of one as opposed to the other instead of recognising that today what teachers require is the ability to teach and to know what they are teaching. 
Hon BRIAN DONNELLY (NZ First) 
: 
 I would like to open by commending the Government on the injection of funding it has put into the universities with a particular focus on increasing the salaries of university staff by an additional 3 percent over and above what it was able to do with the inflation-adjusted operational funding the universities were receiving. Certainly that injection was long overdue. For too long we have failed to recognise particularly for university staff how they are really part of an international labour market. We had very clearly started to fall behind the eight ball in terms of international competitiveness in the rates we were offering to our academics in particular so I have to give the Government a plus for providing that funding. 
However what it actually does—and this was demonstrated in a question I asked Dr Cullen in the House a couple of weeks ago—is to raise the question of why people who teach degree courses at Auckland University of Technology should be given additional funding for a 3 percent increase in their salaries when people who teach the same degree courses at Unitec for example will not receive it. What is the justification for that split between two institutions that are very close on the Performance-based Research Fund scale and also on things like the proportion of sub-degree programmes? 
That exposes a flaw in the structure of our tertiary institutions. We have a number of good-quality universities—up amongst the top 200 in the world or so and some up in the top 50—and we have another range of universities that are not quite so good as those in the research field some of which are somewhat smaller than the top universities. Then we have those two institutions which are very very similar in profile that happen to be in the middle and finally we have urban polytechs and provincial polytechs. So we can think of it as a spectrum of provision. We have made a division right down through the middle between two institutions that are in fact almost identical in profile. The Minister of Education Steve Maharey really needs to answer the question of why certain provisions that are being made for one of those institutions are not being made for the other. That is the first comment that New Zealand First would like to make with regard to the Budget. We think the increased funding for the universities was a fine gesture but the Government has to do some thinking-through on that matter. 
The select committees this year were invited to comment on the quality of intended expenditure. That was a particularly difficult task but one area that New Zealand First would like to comment on in terms of what we consider to be not very good expenditure is the issue of interest-free student loans. We think they are a give-away to students because there is no doubt that what is paid back will be less than what was given by the Government in the first place. We cannot see the justification for supporting students through that means. We see justification for supporting students but we think it should be premised on a universal student living allowance because that actually has some philosophical foundation in terms of the premises upon which we run our nation. But interest-free loans certainly do not have that foundation and we believe that they are an example of poor expenditure coming out of this Budget. 
We applaud the development of curriculum materials in the three Pasifika languages. The media release that came out with the Budget actually suggested that those three languages would be the languages of the nations that New Zealand is in free association with—in other words the Cook Islands Niue and Tokelau—and therefore one could say it sounded like a pretty good idea that we have some responsibility for the maintenance of those languages. However from the select committee hearings it seems that in fact those are not the languages that are being supported and that there are a couple of languages other than the three that I mentioned. So time and time again I asked at the select committee level what the principles are upon which we decide which languages we support and which languages we do not. In fact the chief executive officer of the Ministry of Education said that there are no principles—that the ministry does not have any. I urge the Government to start to think through that issue because 167 languages are spoken in this country. Are we going to provide emergent education with materials and trained teachers for each one of those 167 languages? If for example some Latvian parents say they deserve the right to have their children taught in Latvian upon what basis would we make that decision? At this particular point we have no principles. I suggest that the nations that are in free association with New Zealand and whose peoples are New Zealand citizens should have their languages protected. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 The Minister in the chair the Hon Steve Maharey should tell us why Parliament is bothering to appropriate any money for him and his ministry. Appropriating the money through these estimates for students and teachers is fine but in the fading months maybe few years of his career the Minister needs to do something better than try to spend all his time oiling the social democratic consensus around Wellington about education. That is what he says it is about. He told the  
New Zealand Herald  
a couple of months ago that the problem with the National Party was that it was trying to “wreck the social democratic school system”. Well we are not appropriating money for a plaything of the left elite; we are appropriating money so that students get the best education we can give them. The Minister should get up and tell us just where the momentum is in his education policy. Because there is none. At least with Trevor Mallard as education Minister—it might have been all in the wrong direction or all over the place and sometimes right—at least he had some energy and momentum. No doubt Minister Maharey is so thoroughly burnt from the mess he made in tertiary education—and I hope so because I would not want to see him trying too hard in schooling if he were going to have the same impact as he had in tertiary education. I want to know where his sense of direction is that is not any more than overseeing the last remaining momentum of the moves that Trevor Mallard made. 
I would like the Minister to give us his considered analytical rather than political opinion about the National Certificate of Educational Achievement. This year three things have happened with that certificate. The first is that in the external examinations 30 percent of the results fell outside the National Certificate of Educational Achievement benchmarks for valid results. I did not make that up; that is the analysis. The second is that his ministry did a survey that showed there are major problems with motivation for the large bulk of students— “If you make it easy they’ll take it easy.” And they are! Over three-quarters of students get only an “achieved” or “not achieved”. The trend to unit standards in internal assessment is picking up speed because students think that that is the easy way to get through. 
The third thing is the revelations over the weekend that the internal assessment moderation is actually a joke. I can recall the new chief executive of the ministry when she was in the New Zealand Qualifications Authority saying the ministry moderated every standard every year. Well that is just nonsense. The Minister stood up in the Chamber today and said: “Oh it’s only 3 percent of the standards.” and then admitted that it was a sample. If the ministry moderates only 3 percent what happens to the other 97 percent? So we have no idea what is going on. The 3 percent is a sample—a slightly biased sample if we believe what the rules say. Of course the Minister has no idea whether teachers are sending in the assessments they should be—no idea at all. There is no way of telling whether teachers are doing what the New Zealand Qualifications Authority says they are. So those are three pieces of evidence and none of them is being listened to. Each one of them has a solution that has been tried out thought through and implemented in other jurisdictions. But no the Minister is so fixed on his social democratic position—keeping faith with the left in case he can have a shot at the Labour leadership—that he will not concede one single issue. 
Now he has a new chief executive of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority who does not know anything about education. They have appointed Bali Haque who has been one of the strongest political proponents of it in every controversial media story as the senior civil servant in charge of it. So now nothing is going to happen. It is all perfect it is all right! The fact that thousands of students get the wrong result does not matter nearly as much as maintaining the Wellington pinko consensus about education and how it is working! 
It is the same consensus that is preventing parents from getting access to information about their schools. We have had a bit of a tussle over the last 12 months or so over the SchoolSmart website and apparently it is going to bring down civilisation if parents find out that the school their child is at is going off the rails. Everyone else is allowed to know—the Minister the bureaucrats the Education Review Office—but parents are not allowed to know. 
To make a total nonsense of that position RateMyTeachers.com shows up in New Zealand. That is a website where they rate their teachers. It has all sorts of gossip and malicious material on it and they should filter out more. But that is where the technology is taking us. The last time I looked was a couple of weeks ago and there were 50000 ratings of teachers in just about every secondary school in New Zealand. Actually on average most teachers rate above average—once they have enough postings on the ratings out of five most of them are over 2½. That is not a bad thing. But it makes a nonsense of the Minister’s trying to sit on valuable tested and reliable data that would be available instead of malice and gossip from kids. Of course the union has come out and said it will take legal action and figured out very quickly that that looked really stupid. So now we are all allowed to sit in the comfort of our own homes and read gossip about any teacher anywhere in the country and what the kids think. We can know that in great detail but we cannot know the valid objective data the Minister of Education has. 
The Minister stood in the Chamber and said firstly that we could not have it because it was collected on the basis that it would not be divulged. That is wrong. There is no formal arrangement. He did not know or he deliberately misled us. Then he stood up and said that all those groups agree that it should not be made available. Well I have written to all the groups. School trustees do not agree. They are trying to get access to it. So far from being opposed to its being available they want access to it. The Post Primary Teachers Association has no formal policy position on it—except that it does not like it. It suspects that it will now become public. The New Zealand Educational Institute has got formal resolutions. The Secondary Principals Association will not reply and I think that that is because it cannot decide. 
Even if they all did agree to keep that information secret they cannot all agree to break the law. In fact it is official information and should be available under the Official Information Act. But what does the Secretary for Education do? I sent him a request under the Official Information Act and first he said he had lost it so I sent it again. Then he took about 5 weeks to read my two-paragraph letter and then said that I could not ask him; I had to ask the Minister. Well it is on the Minister’s plate. The Official Information Act request was for the website—not access to it—in electronic form and he has to decide whether he will make it available. 
The Minister does not care about the information; he just wants to make sure that his mates in the unions and the upper reaches of the Labour Party believe that he is a true believer and he is not going to let anyone wreck his social democratic school system. Does it not make one wonder what they talk about when they all get together in the Minister’s office about how they are going to defend the social democratic school system from nasty right-wingers like parents! 
Hon Steve Maharey 
: Like you. 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Well I am. I believe that parents should make their decisions about schools on the basis of the best information the Government can give them not prejudice or decile rating. Because that is the system that the Minister prefers. 
 What this Government does is to put an index of brownness on every school and make sure that everyone knows what it is. That is the only objective data the Government provides to every New Zealand parent—that is a decile rating. Nothing could be more misleading about educational achievement or progression of students than the decile rating of a school but this Minister thinks that is fine because he does not care. All that matters to that Minister is that he is quietly managing his portfolio and keeping Dr Cullen off his back in order to maintain his credentials as a potential Labour leader—and the momentum is gone. 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY (Minister of Education) 
: 
 I think that is all the speakers in the debate so let me just review a few of them if I can for a moment. I thank those who have participated in the debate. As I think Mr Peachey said at the beginning this is one of the areas we ought to be talking about and I will reflect for a moment on what I think the argument was that he was putting forward about the nature of modern education—meaning to offer a lot more choice flexibility and responsiveness to pupils their parents and the community. There are a number of ways we could do this. 
I remember some time ago I had the privilege of being in Minneapolis - St Paul when they offered full choice total choice to people just within the city. As people know Minneapolis - St Paul straddles quite a large area but it is a compact area. I arrived there just after the educational authorities had stopped their experiment with choice of the kind that used to go with the model whereby one allowed people to go to any school they wanted to. The reason they had stopped was that within 6 months of allowing people to take their children wherever they wanted to and make that free choice to go to any school their bus budget had blown out by US$22 million. That is of course why countries do not opt for that kind of choice because if they did they would be paying for people to transport themselves all around the schools. The other thing they found that was a corollary of that policy was people immediately shifted into black and white schools which Minneapolis - St Paul now has a legacy of. 
I think that that does not mean we should not be offering choice flexibility or responsiveness but I guess the way we are approaching it is to ask ourselves how we can make sure that every school is able to take pupils in the classroom and tailor the learning to what they actually need. That has to be our ambition. 
I notice that the OECD is now talking about that being the ambition for the countries that it represents—that the educational policy should move away from the mass form of education of the last century which we all know was the vision we had here. We all went through it. We sat in large classes and we got pretty much one-way traffic from the teacher. It did not matter whether we learnt fast slow or whatever our learning style was we kind of took what was given to us. I think that was totally cutting edge education in those days. 
These days I think we would say that unless we can more and more begin to address the speed at which students learn the style in which they learn and their interests so that they maximise their opportunities at school we are not doing a good job for them. But my ambition and this Government’s ambition is to try to deliver that level of choice school by school by school—not to have us say that some schools are not doing so well so that we end up with ghettos where some kids cannot get out and the kids who can migrate have gone off to schools where they can do it. 
So I do not think we disagree on the ambition I say to Mr Peachey. I think our vision this century has to be how to have the kind of teaching and leadership— 
Hon Bill English 
: Why do you always agree with us? 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: Well I always agree with people who make common sense statements—I am coming to Mr English in a moment. Mr Peachey raises interesting points and so does Mr Donnelly but Mr English is a different kettle of fish. We are saying we agree I think on what we need from education but we have to have some interesting debates about how we get there. So let us keep that discussion rolling. 
I say to Mr Donnelly just to respond to the university staff business that I was delighted to see that staff are to receive some more money. It is ridiculous that people can study for a post-doctorate qualification for 3 years—they might have been off doing some insecure research somewhere—and they start on $45000. I mean who is kidding who? Few people will stay in the university system in this country if those are the kinds of wages available to them. And of course we have to put up with the fact that as a country we cannot afford the kind of library facilities or infrastructure that there may be in some of the better universities around the world. Let us not applaud other universities too much. If one is in the French German or other university systems one can be in some pretty ratty universities but the best universities can offer enormous advantages to students who have gone on to get a good PhD and so on. So we have to fight for our share of those people and getting a lift in their wages is one of the ways of doing it. 
I would encourage universities to come under a multi-employer collective agreement. That is the answer I think to having differentials between different universities. 
Hon Bill English 
: More social democratic nonsense. 
Hon STEVE MAHAREY 
: I think it is a good social democratic idea—and I thank Mr English for reminding me. But that is one of the answers to try to make sure we get that kind of compensation across the sector. That does not stop a university saying that it will pay Mr Donnelly the same amount of money that it is paying Mr Peachey but on top of that Mr Donnelly is somebody the university wants to hold on to because of his research record so it will pay him some more. At least it gives a basic comparison across the sector and I think a multi-employer collective agreement would do that. 
Maybe a universal loan is something that New Zealand First wants to put up in the next round post the next election and Mr Donnelly certainly would not find me resisting the general argument of why we would want a universal allowance. It is an idea that we have clearly signalled we would like to go to if we could afford to prioritise that kind of expenditure. So that is something that stays on the ground. 
The languages policy is something that worries me quite a lot. We do not have a great languages policy at the present time. We do know that we will cover the three official languages—sign language Maori and English. We know we have the languages policy around the larger Pacific Island languages which means that we will not do total immersion but what we are paying for is to ensure that those languages are able to be taught. In areas where there are large numbers of Tongan and Samoan students and so on students should have access to their language but the member is right. In Counties-Manukau at the present time 164 languages are present in that community and there is no way that the New Zealand educational community will be able to say that because someone comes from Somalia and there are 30 people in that person’s community in Wellington the educational community will be able to provide a full effort for that person to be involved in that curriculum. 
My belief is that the best way forward is to guarantee our three official languages and to look at those languages that have large constituencies where people may want to be able to speak them. In the case of the Tongan language for example in an area like Auckland we could have schools where 80 percent of the students come from Tongan families and we could offer quite substantial language tuition in those schools. Elsewhere I think we should simply offer language tuition in the way that we traditionally have where people can learn French German or whatever. That policy has to become clear in the very near future because we are in deep trouble if we do not resolve that issue. So I think that is a very very good point. 
I will just turn to Mr English who is known as the new conservative. I do not know whether people know this. I thought it was an oxymoron—new conservative—but an oxymoron is what Mr English wants to represent himself to be. Of course we know that all this talk about leadership here tonight is really just a projection I think Freudian psychoanalysts call it because he is concerned about his own leadership opportunities and we have seen that time and time again in the House as he tries to prepare for it. It is hard as the newspapers say. How does one come back from having destroyed the health system and the economy and from having been the leader of a party through the worst campaign anybody can remember in its history? How does one come back from all that? That is why I think it has been so difficult for Mr English this evening. It would be good if he did not go through all those kinds of things and force people to argue with him but of course that is what he did this evening. 
He did raise some points that I want to mention. I think that the majority of people right throughout the education sector regard the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) as being the best way to go. Mr English may want to return to norm referencing but the educational community does not. The educational community wants to move on with standards-based assessment and it knows the bulk of it is going well. It wants to see effort put into refining the system so that it becomes as good as it can be. 
Mr English claims constantly that people do not recognise issues. We do. There are things wrong with the system at the present time. It is only 3 years old; there are many things we still have to do. There have been 226 changes made to it already and a lot more changes will be made in the future. But what we have at the present time is a system that is working well. After the assessment season last year it has worked well. We have had good fair consistent assessment across the bulk of students. 
When we go back to the kinds of debates that have been raised here we see these kinds of spurious debates all the time. Mr English for example tells us about a piece of research. I am not sure whether he noticed this but the Government actually commissioned the research—both lots of research. We asked for them because we want to improve the system. We were told by Luanna Meyer from a good research team that the system is fundamentally sound but that we have some improvements to make. Those improvements mainly rest upon the way teachers use the NCEA system. Professional development as they begin to understand how to use the system will mean that the system will be used a whole lot better. 
It has always been a problem to motivate students. I would ask how many people in the House who have a university degree did not at some time during it get what was called a “gentleperson’s C”. Lawyers often ask themselves how much work they really need to do to get through a law course—I imagine that Mr Simon Power now and again said to himself that he would pull back on one course because he needed to put a little more into something elsewhere. He might like to stand up later and tell us what his transcript says he got at university. I imagine that it is outstanding but I imagine also that the odd “C” appears because he kind of cruised through some of his courses. 
Did he lack motivation in the way Mr English wants to define it? Did he get lazy? Did he sit back and say that he did not want to do it? Of course not. People who go through all the assessment we have in this country will make some choices and it is up to teaching teachers and leadership. We have a chance to use the system to motivate students to do better. People in the House who like Mr Donnelly me and Mr Peachey have taught in classrooms know that that is the job of the teacher. This system does not de-motivate people; it actually stretches them more than any system has ever done before because it offers them the chance to reach a level of excellence that they have never had before. It is down to the teaching. That is what Luanna Meyer told us in that research and that is what we will have to focus on. 
I will move on to what we are spending our money on. Let me just remind Mr English of the things we are spending our money on. We are focused on great teaching great leadership adequate resourcing for our schools keeping kids at school until they are 16 and making sure that clear boundaries are set for good behaviour in schools so they can focus on what they are doing. We are focusing on foundation skills so kids can read and write. We are focusing on the teaching and learning in secondary schools where we think major changes are yet to be made. We are focusing on parents and the wider community engaging with their schools to ensure they are doing as much as they possibly can. Those are the things we are focused on. 
If we do all of those things well we will take a good system and turn it into a great system. Going back to Mr Peachey that has to be the aim of every member here—not the nit-picking of the man who calls himself a new conservative and is waiting to try to take over the National Party. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That Vote Education be agreed to 
. 
Ayes 61 
New Zealand Labour 50; New Zealand First 7; United Future 3; Progressive 1. 
Noes 48 
New Zealand National 48. 
Abstentions 6 
Green Party 6. 
Vote Education agreed to. 
Vote Education Review Office 
ALLAN PEACHEY (National—Tamaki) 
: 
 I feel that this vote should not pass without comment. Something like $26 million of taxpayers’ money will go into maintaining the Education Review Office for the next 12 months. I stated publicly on a number of occasions before I was elected to this Parliament that I had a long time ago lost confidence in that organisation. I have been staggered by the number of teachers principals and board of trustees representatives who are now contacting me to express their concerns about the way the Education Review Office is doing its job. 
I invite the Minister to rise and explain one or two things that are not clear. The first is this. So often when one looks at a review report on a school one finds a statement like: “Most of the teaching is satisfactory.” or “Most teachers are satisfactory.” The Education Review Office would claim that such assertions are made on the basis of an evidence-based inquiry methodology. The Education Review Office was not able to explain to a select committee exactly what that methodology is. The Minister may like to attempt to do so when he takes the call. 
Let us think about it from a parent’s point of view for a moment—reading in a report about a school that most teachers are satisfactory. By implication clearly some are not. That is the judgment of the Education Review Office. What if one’s own child is in one of the classes where the teaching is not satisfactory? How is one to know that from the reports produced using the $26 million the Government is spending on this organisation? Nowhere in a review will parents be able to find out whether a school has the support of its community. I have been deeply concerned about some of the Education Review Office reports I have been shown whereby clearly the community is voting with its feet and turning its back on a school yet nowhere in the report is it stated that the school has lost connection with its community—that the aspirations and expectations the community has for its children are not being met by the aspirations the school has for them and that the board of trustees might like to consider this and might like to consider engaging with its community. Nowhere will one find such a statement. So how can the Education Review Office give us such waffly reports—reports that clearly are designed not to upset people who clearly must not be upset—yet claim they are based on an evidence-based inquiry methodology? 
Secondly I invite the Minister to explain to the Committee if he can what methodology the Education Review Office applies how it is applied and what parents should make of it. Let us be very clear about this. There is no point in spending $26 million of taxpayers’ money if the reports we get are vague general non-specific and do not assist parents and others with an interest in a school to form an accurate impression as to whether it is a suitable school for their children—whether they can put their children into the school with absolute confidence that they will be well taught as well as be safe and all those other important things. 
I believe that the Education Review Office has fallen into a trap. I hope that under new leadership—and I note that it is to have new leadership which is interesting—the Education Review Office will move beyond one of its fatal flaws: the preconceived ideas and prejudices of its leadership and its reviewers. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That Vote Education Review Office be agreed to 
. 
Ayes 61 
New Zealand Labour 50; New Zealand First 7; United Future 3; Progressive 1. 
Noes 48 
New Zealand National 48. 
Abstentions 6 
Green Party 6. 
Vote Education Review Office agreed to. 
Vote Research Science and Technology agreed to.  
Vote Defence 
RON MARK (NZ First) 
: 
 I want to speak about the Vote Defence budget for 2006-07. I have to say that it is a vast improvement on the level of defence expenditure over previous years. I refer particularly to the 1970s 1980s and 1990s when some of us in uniform were so poorly equipped under previous Governments—and I have to say under National Governments—that we were not able to be issued with blank ammunition and we spent our time running around on field exercises saying “bang bang” instead. I remember those days very very well. 
Much has been said about Labour’s expenditure on defence and I have to point out a couple of facts. It was Labour that bought the Mercedes truck fleets Labour that bought the V8 Land Rovers and Labour that bought the Scorpion tanks and the frigates. The only problem is that we should have bought more. In the very near future Labour will be introducing Project Protector which we had a briefing on. I do recall that National gave us the  
Charles 
Upham 
 and announced the purchase of heavy machine-guns—the .50 calibre Brownings—that were to be a new addition to our arsenal. The only problem was that those heavy machine-guns had been in service since World War II having been built in 1942 and had been used in Korea Malaya and Viet Nam. Max Bradford’s big hoo-ha that they were new weapons that had been introduced was exactly that—hoo-ha. 
Where Labour has got it wrong though is in disbanding the air combat capability—New Zealand First has always disagreed with that policy—and in particular in introducing the 105 LAVIIIs which were found to be too big too expensive and too cumbersome for the South Pacific. We note with interest that the M113s are still performing admirably in Iraq right now with the United States forces and that they were the first vehicles of the Australian forces to hit the ground in East Timor recently. They provided good muscle manoeuvrability and portability to the forces deployed there to bring peace back into that area. 
Where National got it horribly wrong was in pay and conditions. I recall standing in this House and challenging the National-led Government members led by Jenny Shipley about pay and conditions for service personnel—a challenge they dismissed. I brought to this House and tabled a document that showed that under National’s steerage a recruit soldier in Waiouru was earning $13000 a year. Labour to its credit took the message on board and after a lot of pressure from New Zealand First implemented a number of pay adjustments and adjustments to allowances for the time that personnel were deployed overseas. 
But there is still work to be done. I refer specifically to the New Zealand Special Air Service and the pay allowances and conditions of service for those personnel. Why is that unit important? It is because increasingly internationally it is special operations forces that are the sharp end; they are the point of the spear. In every initiative that takes place internationally in respect of bringing peace stability and conflict resolution it does not matter where we look around the world special forces are the leading edge. Right now we are finding that our special forces are far more effective in Afghanistan than our trying to deploy and maintain a battalion or a company-sized organisation. In fact they have been so effective that they have received a presidential citation. 
The problem is that we cannot ask questions about those forces. I raised with the Minister of Defence Phil Goff at the Foreign Affairs Defence and Trade Committee hearing the issue of how difficult it was for the committee and for Parliament to do its job given the very nature of the SAS because security-wise it is a very sensitive unit and we cannot ask questions. But serious questions must be asked if we are to get to the real root of the problem in terms of pay remuneration and retention of highly specialised highly sought after Defence Force personnel such as these. The questions I would like to be able to ask publicly and get answers to are questions such as these. What are their numbers? How many SAS personnel do we have? How many Regular Force? How many Territorial Force? What are those numbers in comparison to 2 years ago 5 years ago 10 years ago? Does the Territorial Force element of the SAS exist or has it disappeared or become virtually non-existent? What are the SAS pay rates? What are its rank structures? Who gets paid what level of pay? How many of those people are in that rank structure? What are the problems with promotion inside such a small tight-knit organisation that is constrained by the very nature of its speciality? How many SAS personnel are badged each year? How many pass selection? How many go through cycle training and come out the other end as effective SAS troopers? 
We need to know that if we are to understand the sustainability supportability and effectiveness of that unit. But of course it is a secret unit and to give away such information publicly is to undermine its very capability. I understand that more than anyone else in this Parliament. But by not being able to ask those questions and get honest answers from the Government we are unable to address the very pressing need to reinforce and support those personnel and to make sure that they are remunerated appropriately and thereby attracted to stay in the service of the country in the SAS where we so desperately need them. What is the average experience level of those within the unit? Are we losing senior NCOs yes or no? How many senior NCOs on whom we absolutely depend inside the SAS for training the newly badged troops are staying on purely out of loyalty when they should or could be taking retirement? 
All of those questions are important because they help us to understand the specificities of the troopers’ case when it comes to pay and remuneration. I have asked questions of the Minister in the House about pay and conditions for the SAS. Specifically on 9 May I asked him what the hourly base rate of pay was for SAS personnel. He said that the base pay rate was $39000 to $93000 a year and that when deployed overseas they got benefits that kicked up their pay to $80000 to $140000 a year. But the truth I say to the Minister is that that is not exactly the case. The truth in overview is that a trooper gets paid a base salary of $39000 to $43000 a year which is half of what Special Tactics Group police officers receive for sitting on their backsides at home waiting for a call-out. These SAS people do considerably more. The keynote experience as I have experienced is that candidates join the rank at the range of private through to sergeant and therefore come in and remain on protected pay for some time. Lance corporals are on $45000 to $51000 corporals are on $51000 to $55000 and sergeants are on $57000 to $62000. Very few if any of those people get the $78000 that the Minister was talking about. I hope he is listening because he will have to answer me but he is talking to Katherine Rich so how can he possibly know what I am talking about? Very few of those people get even anywhere near what a Special Tactics Group operator gets and those who do get it have to deploy to Afghanistan where they get paid exactly the same remuneration rates as someone who is in a provincial reconstruction team and who is not deployed at the sharp end chasing down al-Qaeda. 
I say to the Minister to bear in mind also that when these lance corporals and corporals who are special in their nature go into the SAS they cannot be promoted further unlike line infantiers who stay in an infantry regiment who can rocket through the ranks if they are that good—and the SAS guys are; they are better—and get more pay. For the Minister to lump in all of the allowances the SAS personnel would get if they were in Afghanistan and to have this House believe that that is their base rate of pay is deceptive to say the least. I put on notice that I am standing for the SAS. I want its personnel to get a pay review. I want a better remuneration package for them. For us not to give them that is to leave them open to being poached by other armies that will pay them better. We know from the work they are doing that we cannot afford to lose these people. Indeed right now we are in danger of losing them to the police force because they can stay at home never leave their families enjoy all the luxuries and perks of life never get a call out for 6 months and get paid twice as much. 
On top of that SAS troops do not have just their black operational role—counter-terrorism—they also have conventional warfare responsibilities that entail them getting out with the battalions in normal peacetime and training for conventional war exercising their speciality alongside and with line infantry. I have a horrible feeling that in accepting some of the words of the officials who have had the Minister believe that every SAS soldier is getting paid $80000 a year which is rubbish we are missing the real value of these people. Without us being able to properly scrutinise them we are running for ourselves the risk of losing more of them and in time of their becoming an ineffective unit. 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 I think many of our thoughts today are with the defence personnel in the Middle East. We have eight military observers as part of a UN force in that region. We have heard some of them speaking from Lebanon recently on the very trying circumstances there. It must be very frustrating and they must be living in some anguish because our defence personnel have been trained properly and have been trained to fight militarily without affecting civilians—to obey the Geneva Convention. Our officers in Lebanon have seen the two combatants Hezbollah and the Israeli armed forces completely defy those rules particularly the fourth Geneva Convention which has been violated by the sending of bombs and missiles into civilian areas where they have killed many people and destroyed basic infrastructure such as electricity sewerage schemes neighbourhoods and bridges. The killing of lots of people applies both to the bombs and missiles of the Israeli armed forces and to the missiles that Hezbollah is sending into Israeli cities. 
Our military—and our Government which has sent our military people there—is well placed to criticise the way in which war crimes are being committed by the Israeli armed forces and Hezbollah today. Those leaders could quite easily in terms of the International Criminal Court legislation that we passed in this Parliament based on the Rome treaty be brought before that court for those war crimes. They are just encouraging the cycle of violence in Lebanon and the Middle East. They are not solving anything—just causing more destruction and death. 
We can contrast that with the way in which our forces have operated in East Timor and the Solomons—and in very trying circumstances when they first went into both places most recently East Timor. They must have been confronted with people who were using various weapons and killing other people. Our forces have operated in a very disciplined manner and I think it is true to say that neither the New Zealand nor the Australian forces have killed any East Timorese. So they have not encouraged the cycle of violence we see in the Middle East. They have not created grievances that can then come back on a peacekeeping force made up of nationals from another country. I think we can take heart from the way our forces have operated although I would say that in the case of East Timor we have to be a little careful that we do not go exactly the same way politically as the Australians have gone. The Australian Government in relation to East Timor seems to have oil on the brain. It has not given the East Timorese people the best deal in terms of the oil resources that lie between East Timor and Australia and that has been a cause of frustration amongst East Timor politicians of all stripes. 
Of course when we talk about peacekeeping in some ways the situations that lead to the need for peacekeeping are because Western countries including Australia and New Zealand have not necessarily put in enough aid or delivered the aid most appropriately. I think that was a problem in East Timor in that there was a significant aid contribution from richer countries but it was not delivered in a way that removed the frustrations that later broke out into conflict in Dili and other places. 
Also to go round the world in review of our defence forces in Bamian our defence forces seem to have operated in a way that has not provoked a reaction and some good reconstruction work has been done amongst the Hazari population in a relatively peaceful environment. We could contrast that with the earlier operation of our special forces in Afghanistan with Operation Enduring Freedom. I cannot tell members any detail about how they operated there because it has been completely secret—overly secret sometimes—but I certainly hope that our special forces operated in a very good and humane way in as much as they could within those operations carried out jointly with the American and other forces. 
What we do see and it is a parallel with what is happening in the Middle East—in Israel Lebanon and the Palestinian territories—in the south and east of Afghanistan today is unfortunately a resurgence of the Taliban who are burning down schools and stopping women from going to school. Unfortunately that is because the way in which the American forces have operated there—and it is parallel to the way they have operated in Iraq—has created more of a reaction amongst the population and has created the ground for such a reactionary backward force as the Taliban to stage a bit of a resurgence. I think it is true that across the region the way in which the Americans have operated be it in Operation Enduring Freedom in the south and east of Afghanistan be it in Iraq or be it their almost total support for what the Israelis are doing in the Palestinian areas and Lebanon has only increased the presence of Islamic extremist forces. 
We have to take a lesson from that in terms of our emphasising peacekeeping and other things that improve the situation for people including better aid. Our defence forces are really just a component of how we rebuild nations which involves getting good governance delivering aid to get social and economic justice and ensuring law and order—and not only our defence forces but also as we have seen in East Timor most recently our police. We have a very strong role to play through the police. What the Government has been doing with Project Protector in getting appropriate boats that can play a role in a range of activities in the South Pacific deserves some praise. The multi-role vessel in particular will be able to trans-ship goods and men to places like East Timor and the Solomons. It will also be involved in disaster relief and civil defence work and in maritime surveillance work along with the good work that the Orions do in helping to surveil our fishing zone and that of our Pacific Island neighbours. It is a good-news story. 
When the patrol boats come on stream they will help us carry out appropriate defence work in our region in contrast with the previous emphasis of our military which was more on coalition activities well away from our shores more on doing the bidding of American Australian or British forces and not necessarily on achieving anything positive in the long term— just as the American forces are not achieving much in Afghanistan and Iraq today. 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Minister of Defence) 
: 
 I thank both Ron Mark and Keith Locke for their comments and I will talk a little around some of the issues they have raised today. I will start with Mr Locke’s comments because they are the ones most fresh in my mind. I thank him for his thoughts on our peacekeeping forces. As part of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization a number of our people are in areas that are subject to attacks from either side because the fire and the rockets are going in both directions. So we have New Zealand Defence Force personnel based in Tyre Lebanon being bombed by the Israelis and we have defence forces based in Jerusalem who are under threat of attack from the militants on the other side. I do not think that in the Middle East the situation is so simple as to be able to blame one side although clearly in this case Hezbollah provoked and Israel overreacted. 
But our troops remain in the Middle East. Their families are in the process of being evacuated at the present time as is sensible given the conditions. I am sure all members of the Committee would want to think about the troops’ situation today and also that of our 26 service personnel based in El Gorah on the Sinai Peninsula. Those personnel have been there a long time now but the situation there has deteriorated sharply. The Rafah gate has now opened—that means there is movement between the Sinai and the Gaza. Also this is an area that has been subject to attacks including a suicide attack aimed at some of our personnel as part of that peacekeeping force in the Sinai. So I think every member of the Committee should acknowledge the work our Defence Force personnel do. We make the easy decision here sitting in our green chairs. They go off and do the work we require of them and they do it professionally competently and in a way that makes them partners of the people they are working with rather than occupiers or antagonists to those groups. 
Keith Locke quite rightly pointed out how well our forces are doing. I acknowledge that Mr Locke supports our forces in East Timor and the Solomon Islands and I welcome the fact that I think for the first time I heard him support the forces in Bamian. Yes our 122 people in Bamian are doing a fantastic job. I have been in Afghanistan a couple of times and have been hugely impressed with what they have done and hugely impressed with the relationship between them and the Hazara people. And why would not the Hazara people want them there when we look at what the Taliban regime did to the Hazara their culture and their heritage? The destruction of those 5000-year-old Buddha statutes was an act of barbaric vandalism that is almost without precedent. 
So in Bamian our people are using soft power. I have read the American report on our forces in Bamian that praises what they have achieved with the use of soft power. But I have to say that even if we are exercising soft power we have to be ready to use hard power and that is why our people are trained for combat. Our SAS personnel who have been on three rotations there have used hard power but what else could they do given the nature of the people they were up against—people whose only form of communication is through terror and destruction? 
We should remember why our people went to Afghanistan in the first place. They went there because the Afghanistan Government the Taliban allowed its country to be used as a host for the terrorist movement that launched the attack on New York and other places on 9/11. One cannot tolerate a Government that allows itself to be used in that way. I say to Keith Locke that we should remember the nature of that regime where girls were not allowed to go to school where women were not allowed to go to work and where the soccer stadium in Kabul which I have stood in was used to execute people every Friday. That was the regime we were dealing with. That was not a regime that was going to be brought down by soft power; it was a regime that had to be removed by hard power. Although Afghanistan has a long way to go we have made some real progress there. Afghanistan still has a long way to go on the fact that it is close to being a narco-state on the fact that there are still warlords and on the fact that there are still Taliban elements both in Afghanistan and across the border in the north-west territories. But our people are there for a good cause and most people in this Chamber voted for them to be there. We should be very grateful for the job they are doing. 
I have had the chance in the last couple of months to visit along with Ron Mark our people on the ground in the Solomon Islands and also in Timor-Leste. Once again I saw our people on the ground welcomed by the people they were working with. They are doing a job in Timor-Leste in a situation that if they were not there with the Australians the Malaysians and the Portuguese I believe would have degenerated into a blood bath. I have no doubt about that at all. The job they are doing is necessary. I expect them to be there probably until the East Timorese elections in April next year. Yes it is a cost to New Zealand but it is an investment in the future of that country. Investing in the stability of the Pacific is an investment in our stability in peace and in the role we can play as a good international citizen in that part of the world. 
I now go to the comments made by Ron Mark and I thank him for his positive comments about the vast improvement in the defence forces. I acknowledge Mr Power’s statement of a couple of years back that the 1990s were hard economic times but they were hard economic times taken out on the military. We ran down our military for economic reasons not ideological reasons but we ran it down to the point where it was not capable of doing the operations we expected of it. When I see our people on the ground now I see them using light armoured vehicles that are state of the art and that are capable of providing the level of protection that we should have had when we had our troops in Bosnia in quite a dangerous operational theatre. I see our people using the light operational vehicles the Pinzgauers in the Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste and our SAS people are returning from their operations using those vehicles. I think those vehicles were a brilliant purchase. They were the best vehicles we could have got. They have served us incredibly well and I am very pleased we have them. 
I had the chance when I was in the Netherlands on trade business in Europe to see the launching of our multi-role vessel and I have to say to Ron Mark that this vessel is no  
Charles Upham 
. It is no lemon. It is a vessel that will serve us well in the Pacific. It will serve us in disaster relief and in terms of deploying our troops anywhere in the Pacific. It has enormous capacity and it will be a great addition as will the other six vessels that will be launched over the next 18 months. We will have the biggest increase in our navy that this country has ever seen. The vessel will be multifunctional in its operations and our people will be proud to be part of the services with the sort of equipment we are giving them. 
I am very pleased about what we have been able to do in the area of the Air Force. There has been the upgrading of the C130s and the P3 Orion surveillance aircraft the modification of the 757 and the—soon I hope—acquisition of helicopters to replace the Iroquois. I love the old Iroquois but they are 40 years old—a bit like the A4s— 
Hon Member 
: 41. 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: Yes 41. The helicopters if the negotiation is successful will be expensive. They have high capacity. They will be working for us for 30 to 40 years. They are currently state of the art and that is the sort of investment we need to make. 
I disagree with Mr Mark of course about the air combat force. We never used the air combat force in operation after 1945. It was always old. It was old the day we bought it and nobody—no Minister of Defence in this Parliament—would ever have deployed our people into combat using A4s. The only place in the world I see A4s today is on podiums around air force bases where they are used as decorative monuments. They were out of date. It would have cost us $800 million to keep them going. We could not have done that and the other very good things we are doing with the Air Force. 
Let me come to the staff numbers. I am pleased that in the last year our Defence Force personnel numbers have increased by 500. There will be a 12.5 to 15 percent increase in Defence Force personnel. They have received—thank you Mr Mark—a salary increase in each of the last 4 years. 
If I can mention the SAS in the time I have left then I will say yes I do want to be more open about the SAS. I hope in a few weeks’ time to be a little more expansive about the sort of work those people have been doing but obviously not at the expense of their well-being and protection. In terms of their salary they have had a 19 percent increase. Yes we cannot compete with the private security commitments in Iraq—we would need to pay our personnel $300000. But the salary they are getting now with the increases is I think—according to the defence forces—comparable with special forces in other countries. Again I am very proud of the work the SAS people do. They have enormous competency. They have enormous courage and I hope that in due course we can share with members the courage they have shown in action. 
Vote Defence agreed to. 
Vote Defence Force agreed to.  
Vote Pacific Island Affairs agreed to.  
Vote Food Safety agreed to.  
Vote Police 
SIMON POWER (National—Rangitikei) 
: 
 Just slightly out of context I congratulate Phil Goff on his rather comprehensive coverage of the defence portfolio. More particularly it signals to those on the other side of the Chamber that he is no longer waiting in his caravan and is actively pursuing the job he has always been after. We will look and see how that comes about. I also take this opportunity—because I probably will not get another—to wish Jim Sutton well and to extend to him my personal thanks for the work he did after the floods in Rangitikei in 2004. I wish him well. 
On the issue of Vote Police I acknowledged at the time of the Budget—and have done so on numerous occasions since then—that the extra money the Government has put into the police is to be welcomed. It would be churlish to say otherwise and the Minister gets a bouquet for that particular estimate appropriation. 
I raise a couple of points around recruitment. I want to talk about it not in the context that members may expect but in a slightly more abstract way. I am interested in the Minister Annette King’s views on this issue. I cannot understand how a Minister who is used to dealing in hard detailed and tricky policy areas like health managed to stitch the Government into a deal with New Zealand First prior to the Budget to deliver 1000 new police plus 250 others without any real or detailed policy work to back up that decision. All the documents I have seen relating to this decision in Vote Corrections Vote Courts and in fact Vote Justice show that no real work has been done on the downstream effects of more police. Clearly if we have more police—and whether we get to the 1000 is another debate that we will have shortly—presumably unless they are all on traffic duty there will be more arrests. If there are more arrests there will presumably be more convictions. I want to know what work has been done with Damien O’Connor who has been wandering around the country complaining about the number of people in our prisons. I also want to know what is to be done with Mr Barker and his view that it is all a bit too hard when we fine people and do not have the ability to get them to do community service in any meaningful way. 
The first answer as far as I can tell to the number problem—not the policy problem—was to recruit from the UK. That was fair enough except that the attrition rate is up around the 30 percent mark. The attrition rate from the police is not a concern per se because as the Minister rightly points out that fluctuates between 4 and 6 percent on a reasonably regular basis—I have to say to the Minister that the rate is creeping quietly towards the 5 percent mark. The problem is the age and experience of those people who are leaving the police and I would be interested in her views on that. 
Then the Government together with New Zealand First decided that the way to solve this recruitment problem was to reduce the entry standards into the police. What I found fascinating about this argument—which we could have seen coming over the horizon from about 6 years ago once Ron Mark started talking about it—was that it was not the Minister who fronted this particular announcement it was Ron Mark. I know Annette King well enough to know that she is a pretty canny politician. She knows a good story and she knows a good thing when she is on to it. Why has Ron Mark been pushed out to front this reduction in standards for recruitment while Annette King remains strangely silent throughout the process? I bet any member of this Committee that had the news been good the canny Annette King would have been all over the announcement of the reduction in standards. A police recruit now has to leap a four-foot wall rather than a six-foot wall—even Lindsay Tisch I imagine could hurdle that on his hands and knees. 
What has happened is that the Police Association has said that it needs somewhere between 2250 and 2500 police to meet the target. Thirteen days into the big recruitment drive the human resources manager from the police stated in the  
New Zealand Herald  
that they did not get the full numbers 
for 
the first intake to the Police College but that there was no need to worry because they would make up for it by wandering around schools and recruiting school leavers to the police to make up the numbers. The problem is that with the number of well-trained experienced officers leaving the force someone has to train the new recruits. 
In the policy context—going back to where I started from—I worry that this work has not been done properly. The Government’s crime reduction strategy which Treasury had a flick at in December 2005 makes it clear that at that point the work had not been done on the downstream fiscal costs and other costs for the corrections and courts systems. I do not believe that that work has to this day been completed. I have not yet seen a document that has explained in any meaningful way what the proposed increase will do to the courts and corrections systems. We cannot on the one hand have Damien O’Connor running around the country and continually reminding us of how embarrassed he is about our prison numbers and on the other hand have recruitment standards for new recruits to the police dropping through the floor while the canny Annette King remains quiet and Ron Mark is pushed into the forefront to make the announcement. I have a funny feeling that Annette King’s heart is not in this project. I do not think that she as an experienced and senior member of the Government’s Cabinet believes that real work has been done in a way that has tied up this deal properly in order to take into account those downstream effects. I will be very interested in her comments on that matter. 
There are many other areas that we could explore in Vote Police but we have many many question times ahead of us this year and I will be using those occasions to explore those other matters. 
CHESTER BORROWS (National—Whanganui) 
: 
 There is a line from Gilbert and Sullivan that ends: “A policeman’s lot is not a happy one”. In actual fact I never found it quite that way but there were so many pressures on the police and that remains so today. The police seem to be at the bottom of the tree. They are the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff and at the same time are criticised for not being the fence at the top of the cliff as well. When the on-duty social worker cannot be found or cannot be reached the police are rung. When the school is broken into the police are rung. When the road is blocked the police are rung. The police are the catch-all. 
I will give members an example. Last Sunday I was driving between Waverley and Hawera and there had been a bit of rain up our way. It was starting to dry out and there was a dirty great big rock lying in the southbound lane on a blind corner at Manawapou Hill. I drove up to the top of the hill where I could get some signal rang the local police station and told them. I was told I would be put through to “coms”. I was put through to the communications centre. I stayed on the phone and I was told numerous times that my call was important that I was in a queue and “For God’s sake don’t hang up!” so I hung on. I hung on for 15 minutes and after 15 minutes I did hang up. I rang the police station again and said: “I tell you what—how about you ring coms?”. 
Police officers want a number of things but I do not believe that they want too much. One thing they want is support. They want the numbers and the powers and the Government confidence in them to be able to police with enthusiasm in the way they know it should be done. They want when they need ten staff members to get ten staff members—but that is not always the case. This year it is 25 years since the Springbok tour. During the Springbok tour I was a cop in Nelson. There was a sergeant and five on five sections who worked around the clock. Tonight I rang up my mate who is a sergeant in Nelson and there is a sergeant and two staff members on duty. Things have changed. 
Just before the election Labour took six staff members away from the Wanganui station and put them somewhere else closer to Auckland where apparently they were required. Everybody in Wanganui said “Dumb move!” but not the Government. All Labour could quote were the overall staff numbers and levels which had gone up nationally: “You don’t need those staff; you won’t get ’em; and you won’t get ’em under us.” A local councillor decided to put together a petition. He put together a petition for extra police. Labour said “Rubbish!”. In fact Labour in our area screeched “Rubbish! You don’t need ’em.” In fact 11000 people signed the petition and Labour still said “Rubbish! You don’t need them.” The campaign heated up and Labour still said “Rubbish!”. National’s policy was to increase the number of police at that time prior to the election and its policy was to increase those numbers by about a thousand. But still Labour said—members have guessed it—“Rubbish! Scaremongerers!”. 
Winston Peters promised to double police numbers just before he promised he would not take the baubles of office. He was going to double the number of police. He was going to have so many police they would be coming out of his ears and we would not know what to do with them. But Labour said that that was—members have guessed it—“Rubbish!”. Then the polls kicked in and Labour said: “Tell you what: we’ll give you 250 more community cops.”—and National said “Rubbish!” and New Zealand First said “Rubbish!”. But Labour needed a coalition partner and looked around and Winston said “Pick me. Pick me.” Labour said “A thousand new police?” and Winston said “Yes now you’re smokin’!”. The Greens said “Rubbish!” and Labour said “Now you’re smokin’.” So the Government reckons it will get its thousand new coppers and I tell you what—I really hope it does because I do believe we need them. And I hope they do because nothing is better than seeing a Labour Government implement National Party policy. 
I cannot say it will be easy; the Minister has agreed it will not be easy. The trouble is that the quota system has been denied and the calculation of income as revenue has still been denied but when the Government has been forced to admit it it has had to admit that there has been a negative impact on policing because so many of the police are turning down jobs on the basis that they do not want to become “road Nazis”. 
KATE WILKINSON (National) 
: 
 If we look at the police’s mission statement we see that it is “To serve the community by reducing the incidence and effects of crime detecting and apprehending offenders maintaining law and order and enhancing public safety.” and that is exactly what we should expect. But whereabouts in that mission statement does it talk about host responsibility? The latest course created by the Government is to send our hard-working front-line policemen and policewomen on a course run by KiwiHost to provide “customer experience management programmes”. That 3-day training course at a cost of $900 per person covers such things as “avoiding the dangers of too much knowledge”—not a problem of the Labour Government I would have to say—“learning techniques for switching an angry customer into a satisfied one using the smile mirror understanding how to use complaints as a gift and learning about managing moments of truth”. This course is for the hospitality industry not for our police force. Our police are not there to learn silver service so that they can correctly wait on tables in the police cells and to know how to serve from the left and take from the right. Our police are there to maintain law and order— 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: What! 
KATE WILKINSON 
: —I know what—to reduce crime nonetheless and to detect offenders yet this Government is teaching them silver service. 
Our police force is even given ticketing quotas as “a great opportunity to get our ticket count up to ensure we end up as the top group.” But that policy does not even send our policemen and policewomen to traffic blackspots to reduce traffic accidents or the road toll—no. It is not just to keep our roads safe; they are sent to already safe areas such as the corner of McFaddens Road and Cranford Street in Christchurch— 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: I know it well. 
KATE WILKINSON 
: The member should know it well and he should be careful of the flush median strip because in 1 day 16 tickets were issued at a cost of $150 each. In fact 30 tickets in 1 month in Christchurch were issued to drivers using a flush median strip on the road in order to make a right-hand turn so as not to disrupt the flow of traffic. They were issued tickets for allegedly overtaking on a flush median strip yet they were not even breaking the law. And this is where our valuable police resources are being spent. We have already heard that the Labour Government has been caught out deceiving the public over the existence of traffic ticket targets and competitions. So while the real criminals are getting away with serious crime ordinary law-abiding citizens are being charged for lawfully using a flush median strip to turn right. It is all because of this Government’s directive to get the ticket quota up because that is easy; that is measurable. 
But it is far too hard for this Government to come up with any policy to actually reduce proper crime and to defend and protect the public of New Zealand. Members of our sworn police force want to defend and protect our public but instead have been turned into ticket collectors or even into waiters learning silver service. That is another valuable resource squandered—another valuable resource wasted—by this Labour Government. 
Figures show that last year police attended only 83 percent of burglaries within 24 hours compared with 85 percent and 86 percent in previous years; that of the 12 police districts eight were either worse or showed no improvement at all; and that in Auckland City the percentage attended within 24 hours has dropped from 80 percent to 73 percent while in Canterbury it has dropped from 83 percent to 75 percent. I know from personal experience because my law-abiding office was burgled last week and it took until the next day for me even to see a policeman—actually it was a policewoman. In those areas a quarter of all reported burglaries—and ours in the office was reported—are not attended by the police within 24 hours. The number of reported burglaries increased in 2005 to 58133. There is a problem; it is about priorities. 
Hon ANNETTE KING (Minister of Police) 
: 
 I thank the three members who have contributed to the estimates debate on Vote Police but I have to say I am extremely disappointed that not one of them said one word of support for the New Zealand Police. Did we hear from members opposite that our police who go out on the streets 24/7 have done and do a good job? There was not one word. We heard snivelling whingeing and groaning from people who want to make political points but who were not prepared to say they were proud of the New Zealand Police. Well I am—I am very proud of the New Zealand Police and I am particularly proud to be their Minister. They are out there working on behalf of New Zealanders. They go into situations most of us cannot even imagine and they do that on our behalf. 
I would like to say to those listening tonight that they ought to be proud of the New Zealand Police for the work they do but they ought to be very disappointed in National’s law and order spokesperson because he did not have a good word to say about the police. In fact the hallmark of his press statements has been to criticise everything that the police do. The police cannot open the door of their car or go out on the streets without the member putting out a press statement to criticise the work that they do. 
I would like to go through some of the issues that were raised by members in their speeches and I would like to start with Kate Wilkinson. She criticised the police because some of them—in fact at this stage it is not the sworn police but some of the non-sworn police—have gone on KiwiHost courses. I just happened to find in my file that in 1996 the National Party in Government were urging New Zealanders and departments to take up the KiwiHost option. It is not about silver service or whether one uses a serviette it is the way one actually deals with the public. So it was OK to have KiwiHost in 1996 but it is a terrible idea 10 years later. I would like to say to members opposite that whatever happens in terms of the police having a good relationship with the public whether it is the people who answer the phone or whatever their job is I think that that is a good thing. I think that is a very good thing because they are a public service. 
Darren Hughes 
: Stick to that line. 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: I will stick to that line. I was also interested in the member’s views on road policing. One does not get a ticket in New Zealand unless one breaks the law. If one breaks the law one gets a ticket. That is how it ought to be. The very member who raised the issue of a median strip asked me the same question and I replied: “Yes tickets have been issued.” What she did not tell this Committee which she liked to miss out was that the public had complained about the people who were driving over that median strip. So I take from that that the member could not care a hoot what the public feel about road policing. She does not want people to get tickets when they break the law even if New Zealanders complain. I am pleased that the police listen to the public when they lay complaints and ask them to look at particular spots. I am pleased that they do that. 
I want to tell the member that I think she ought to take a close look at road policing because road policing is a very important part of policing in New Zealand. It is not just about speeding tickets not wearing one’s seat belt trying to save people’s lives trying to stop hospitalisations or trying to stop the knock in the middle of the night from the officer who tells a person that his or her family member has just been killed on the road. Road policing is also about stopping crooks who are in cars. It is also about picking up the people who are stopped at a roadblock and who have a P lab in the boot of their car or have a gun or may well have been part of a burglary. I can provide members if they are interested with the sorts of people who are picked up at roadblocks through road policing. Policing on the roads is not just about traffic tickets. 
I would like to respond to Chester Borrows a former police officer. He started off by saying that a policeman’s lot is not a happy one. He did not feel that when he was in the police but he must be feeling that an ex-policeman’s lot is not a very happy one now. I would not be surprised if the people of Wairoa at this very moment are not revving up their cars or loading up the buses and heading for Wanganui to picket outside his office. This member was silly enough to say that any policeman who would like to go to Wairoa must have read a “bloody good brochure”. Well I have to tell Chester Borrows that he has really upset the people of Wairoa. The Mayor of Wairoa is in Wellington this very night. 
Darren Hughes 
: It’s a wonder the member was silent. Tolley was silent! 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: Mrs Tolley did not put out a statement saying that Wairoa would need to have a “bloody good brochure” to get people there. I do not know why she has not put a statement out saying that she does not agree with Chester Borrows because the people on this side of the Chamber do not agree with him. Wairoa is a great little place. I am delighted that four British police officers are very happy to be going are in Wairoa and chose to go to Wairoa. So I tell Chester to put on his hard helmet. They are heading his way to say that rural towns such as Wairoa are great places to live particularly under a Labour-led Government that is prepared to put extra police officers into towns. 
I would like to conclude my contribution by dealing with some of the issues raised by Simon Power. He started off by saying—and I thought it was very generous of him to make some comments to my colleague Phil Goff and to Jim Sutton—that Phil Goff was now able to actively seek the role he wanted. Well I tell Simon Power that he is obviously actively seeking the role he wants. When I arrived at the select committee for the estimates examination the cameras were there. It was action. We were starting to roll for Mr Power’s leadership bid. There they were wanting to catch him on tape so he could be just a few steps ahead of Bill English—or was it John Key? I think the real dark horse is my friend Maurice Williamson. Whatever! There was Mr Power—it is all about how one looks what one is saying and how often one can get on television. He said that he was going to ask some serious questions. He asked what work we had done to know what the impact of 1000 extra police would be. Well I would like to tell this Committee that if National Party members could have their bottoms on these green seats on this side of the Chamber they would have promised 2000 cops to New Zealand First 3000 to ACT or whatever party would embrace them so they could get themselves off the Opposition benches and over here to the Government benches. It would not have mattered what it took they would have done it. I tell the member to watch this space because a lot of work has been done by the justice Ministers— 
Simon Power 
: Oh after the decision’s been made! 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: I tell Mr Power that quite often policy decisions are made. I bet that not every policy that the National Party went to the people on was costed. The National Party never costed the impact of the tax cuts it was going to give New Zealanders. It never costed the impact on the police of New Zealand on the health service of New Zealand or on its ability to put money into roads. It never costed the impact on education or on the old people. None of that was costed. It was all about “Give them a few dollars and then they might vote for us.” Well I tell the member to watch this spot. There is certainly plenty of work to show the member very soon. 
I am very pleased that this Government in conjunction with New Zealand First will recruit 1000 extra sworn police over the next three Budgets. We are determined to do that. I tell Mr Power that he was about 3 weeks early with one of his press statements—the ones that are always criticising the police. 
Simon Power 
: No just you! 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: Oh no it is not me; it is the police that the member is criticising. At the end of the day he put out a press statement saying that the police were 300 short on the target. Well unfortunately for him 3 weeks later the figures came out and they were two over what was expected. 
Simon Power 
: Come on! 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: That member wants to say that the police who came from the UK who were trained and who are now out on the street are not police officers. Have members ever heard the likes of it? I need to tell the member that we are pretty pleased with what is happening in police. We are pretty pleased with our ability to go out and recruit those police. I am very pleased that Ron Mark who takes a constructive approach to most things was prepared to work with this Government in helping to recruit those police. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That Vote Police be agreed to. 
Ayes 61 
New Zealand Labour 50; New Zealand First 7; United Future 3; Progressive 1. 
Noes 48 
New Zealand National 48. 
Abstentions 9 
Green Party 6; Maori Party 3. 
Vote Police agreed to. 
Vote State Services agreed to.  
Vote Transport 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (Deputy Chairperson of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee) 
: 
 I am delighted to take a call on transport. I apologise to the House if I sound as though I am beating the same old drum but tonight in the very short period of time I have I will deal with just one very brief part of transport—probably the most important part—which is roading and roading infrastructure. 
I will start by saying something positive about the Budget because I think it is important to say that the National Party has been beating the drum for some time with the message that in these times of economic surplus when the Government has a lot of money in excess of what it is spending our view has been that at least what was being collected from motorists by way of petrol tax road-user charges and motor vehicle registrations should be spent on the roads. We have run that campaign for some years now. The very first of the red and blue billboards at the last election basically stated that. And finally in Budget 2006—and this is where I give some credit to the Minister of Transport Annette King before I get on to some other issues where I do not think there is much credit due—the Minister of Finance came out and announced that over the next 5 years the Government would be spending $13.4 billion on our roading network or on land transport although most of that is for roading and collecting only $13.1 billion. That means that over the next 5 years the Government will be spending around $60 million a year more on land transport than it collects from those three forms of revenue. 
I congratulate the Minister on that. I doubt whether any political party in this House would actually expect the State to spend more than that on the roads. We have finally got the Government there. When Labour runs the line that it has been spending lots on infrastructure for years I can only show members of the Committee graphs like the one I am holding. It shows that in the Labour Government’s first full year in office it actually spent less on land transport than National had spent and that in the next 2 to 3 years when the figures are corrected for inflation spending was actually under the previous level in real terms. So the crocodile tears from the Government about it spending more than National on roading have not been true for some time. But finally I think the Government has done something right. 
I would like to ask the Minister a really important question. If by this acknowledgment that in the next decade or so the roading infrastructure of this country will be so desperately in need of public funding that the Government will need to spend all the revenue from petrol tax road-user charges and motor vehicle registrations on it—in fact as I said before the Government is spending fractionally more than that—why will the Minister not just move away from her ideological position and say that the Government is dedicating the money? The public would love the Government to do that. The Government is actually doing so anyway; that is what the funding level is. The Government has said there is to be a 5-year rolling ongoing funding package. I doubt whether any Government—and I can tell members that when the National Government comes to power in 2008 it will not reduce the sum of money— 
Hon Rick Barker 
: Dreamer! 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: No I am sorry but if there is any dreamer in the House it may be Mr Barker. When the National Party comes to power in 2008 it will not drop the funding for roading. The public will then have some sense of security because they will know that what they pay at the pumps will not go off to pay for other things but will pay for land transport. 
I say to the Minister that the Government has got one leg of the tripod sorted—and I have congratulated it on that—which is the public money allocated to roading. But the tripod will not stand without the other two important legs being fixed. One of them is the Resource Management Act and the Land Transport Management Act with regard to the absolute bureaucratic nightmare that it is to try to gain consent for a new road. I say to the Minister she should go and look at something like the M7 in Sydney which is a 40-kilometre motorway with three lanes going either way. It had a public consultation and consenting process that took 9 months. She should go and look at the Mitcham-Frankston ConnectEast road in Melbourne which is 39 kilometres long with three lanes either way and big tunnels going through metropolitan Melbourne. I am not talking about rural and remote areas—something like the Albany-Puhoi road or Transmission Gully—I am talking about metropolitan Melbourne. The public consultation process took 9 months from go to whoa and building the road took 3 years. It was the same with the M7 in Sydney. 
Yet the chief executive of Transit has told the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee that in New Zealand it now takes considerably longer to gain consent for a new road than it does to build it. And when we asked whether that was true of everywhere else around the world he said he knew of nowhere else where it was anywhere near that level. The rule of thumb was that the consent period was normally about one-third of the construction time so that if building a road took 3 years the consultation time would be about 1 year. Or if the building time was 6 years consultation might take 2 years. I say to the Minister that if she is to get the tripod to stand up—she has one of the legs sorted and I have congratulated her on that one—then somebody in this House will have to be brave enough to say to Parliament that we must have a national strategic importance process for some of the network highways and arterial roads that are both State highways and network arterials. We must amend the Resource Management Act so that there is a special process an exemption in order to see some of those roads built within a realistic time frame. 
I will tell the Minister—she will not remember this; she was not in the portfolio then and probably was not aware of this—that stage one of the Albany-Puhoi project which went through rural farmland in New Zealand took 7 years for the consents process. I have done a calculation on that and I will show it to her if she wants to see it. I have used a spreadsheet and I have prorated the length of the Albany-Puhoi route—it is only two lanes through quite flat rural land—and compared it with the Mitcham-Frankston road in Melbourne which is 39 kilometres long has three lanes and is divided with tunnels through metropolitan Melbourne. If the project is prorated based on length and carriageway and so on then if the Mitcham-Frankston road had been built at the same rate as the Albany-Puhoi project it would have taken 58 years to construct. Australia is doing it in 3 years. So I ask the Minister when we will see anything from her from the Minister for the Environment or from any other Minister about changing the Resource Management Act specifically to see that roading infrastructure is built at a realistic pace. That is the second leg of the tripod. 
We are now the only nation I know of in the developed world—and of many countries in the non-developed world as well—that does not have the private sector as well as the Government funding roading. That is the third leg of the tripod. All three eastern seaboard states in Australia—New South Wales Victoria and Queensland—have massive investment in their roading infrastructure by the private sector. New Zealand does not. All three of those states have Labor Governments interestingly enough. Involving the private sector cannot be a “mad monk of the new right” Tory idea because the Labor parties in New South Wales Queensland and Victoria are doing that. I went to Birmingham in March of this year and saw the M6 toll road which is a magnificent new 27-mile three-lane road built in Tony Blair’s Labour-governed England. The Labour Minister Alistair Darling said the British Government simply cannot come up with the money any more to build the networks the nation needs so it needs the private sector to fund them. Communist China is hardly a right-wing extremist country but it is the biggest builder of private sector roads in the world. 
I would welcome the Minister telling us of another country she knows of that we would see ourselves as being comparable with be it France Germany Spain Italy Austria or the Netherlands that does not have private sector road-building. Yet New Zealand has none and more important we have legislation that actually by its nature stops that from happening. I know a number of private sector investors who would like to invest and who have said there are projects big enough or interesting enough or with a return on investment for them should the Land Transport Management Act not have some of the absolutely ridiculous features that were put in it—not by this Minister; I am not attacking her personally—by the Labour Government to appease the Greens because they were in the driving seat when that legislation was put through Parliament. If anything the Land Transport Management Act needs to be gutted so that we can see not just the public spend at the level it is at—because it is at the right level—but also the Resource Management Act taken to a point where we can have special exemptions in order to get the networks built because built they must be. 
The third thing is that we need to see enough funding coming from the private sector to make us look as though we are in tune and in step with every other nation I can think of. The Minister should look at the Millau bridge in France which is taller than the Eiffel Tower crosses a fantastic valley on the Massif Central and takes over an hour off the north-south journey. The French Government said it just simply could not build it and that the private sector should fund it which it did. The bridge has three lanes going either way and has now become a tourist attraction. People go to the Millau bridge because it is a tourist attraction to see that magnificent piece of engineering. 
Why should we not see that here? We have Macquarie Bank for example—I guess members of the House will not know this. Macquarie Bank is the biggest investor in private roads in the world. Macquarie Bank through Jim McLay and others has said that while the legislation stays as it is in New Zealand the bank will not invest here. 
The Minister must tell the Committee two things. The first is what she will do to reform the Resource Management Act so that realistic consenting periods—periods in line with those in any other jurisdiction we would like to compare ourselves with—will see us build the big networks. I accept that it is fine to leave little local roads to the normal processes. The second thing the Minister must tell us is what she will do in order to see the private sector become a major funder of roading in this country. 
DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East) 
: 
 Following on from Maurice Williamson’s very good points about the three factors in the tripod the first thing I say is that that was a blatant theft of National’s policy going into the last election whereby we said we would spend all the money raised from road taxes on the roads. Due to a one-off payout from the energy sector which is another major part of infrastructural development the Government in essence said all the road taxes are going into road funding. But as the lights go on and off in Auckland over the next decade or so will all that funding for roading come through in the future? There is no guarantee of that; the Government has not entrenched that position in legislation. National has asked the Government on numerous occasions to do that but it has not done so. 
Maurice Williamson talked about private sector involvement and we saw an example today where the Minister of Corrections failed to give any indication that he would allow any private sector involvement in building jails. Ideologically the Labour Government will not allow the private sector to be involved and the same goes for roading. Private sector involvement will not happen because ideologically Labour does not want that sector to be involved. 
And we have seen big issues with regard to Auckland passenger transport a matter that was raised by the Greens after the Budget. Indeed they were quite right to do so. There was nothing in the Budget for Auckland passenger transport. There has been a lot of talk about negotiation at some point in the future but we have not seen anything happen. 
If we look at the Waikato we see a perfect example of what has happened under the Government. We have had about five major 10-year State highway project plans in the last 15 months. Let us look at what actually happened in the Waikato leading up to the election. We had a State highway plan in about February or March of last year that put the Waikato projects way down in priority. The Minister at that time was asked to come and explain that and he did. He said we should wait until June when a new plan was to be put out and we would be all right then. So the Government put out a new plan in June. There was no change in priority; we were still at the bottom. Then he came back and said we should wait for a joint officials group to report—after the election of course! Sure it did that but it was about 12 months later after the Budget. 
After the election we had to wade through five 10-year project plans and then we did not get much. 
Darren Hughes 
: Did they get it or not? 
DAVID BENNETT 
: All the Waikato received was $215 million—that is all. If we compare that amount with the Bay of Plenty at $400 million or Wellington at $885 million we see that is simply not good enough. The Government has let the Waikato down. It produced five reports that told us nothing. It is a case of putting it off and putting it off. Those are the sorts of flip-flops made by the Government as it tries to weasel its way out of any kind of roading programme for the future. 
With regard to the roading programme one of the key issues mentioned by the Minister was that all the roading taxes would go on roading as Maurice Williamson said. Winston Peters and the Minister of Finance both came out and supported those comments. But where has that position been enshrined in legislation? We have not seen that. Will we see that from the Minister of Transport Annette King? I hope she will stand up and tell us that that will be enshrined in legislation so that we all know that position will be part of the future of New Zealand and we will not have to campaign on that issue in future. We ask the Minister to take a call and say it will be enshrined that in future all roading taxes will go on roading. 
Hon ANNETTE KING (Minister of Transport) 
: 
 Can I thank the— 
Dr Richard Worth 
: A useful contribution may occur. 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: Thank you very much to the member who has just made that excellent interjection. I do appreciate his solid support for the speech I am about to make. Firstly I thank Maurice Williamson and David Bennett for their contributions to the debate tonight and say that I have found Maurice Williamson to be a very constructive member of Parliament. He is very happy to give me the benefit of his vast knowledge as a former transport Minister and seriously I have appreciated the discussions we have had. I thank him for his comments regarding the Government’s appropriation for transport in the last Budget. I know that he was particularly pleased but was also very disappointed because in Government he was never able to achieve that level of funding for the transport sector of New Zealand. 
It was an abysmal effort over the 1990s by the National Government as it took money out of the infrastructure—whether in roads health police or whatever. It was unable to put the investment into New Zealand that was needed. I am pleased the National Party acknowledges that in this Budget we are setting out to invest in the roading infrastructure in New Zealand and not only in roading but also in public transport and transport in general over the next 5 years. We have done something that has not been done before in that sector—that is given a 5-year appropriation of funding and certainty of funding over the 5-year period so that roading in particular can be completed. The money has been set out; the programme has been set out by Land Transport New Zealand and Transit New Zealand. The people of New Zealand know that the money is going in. 
I have been asked tonight why we do not enshrine in legislation that we will use all the motor vehicle registration charges the road-user charges and petrol levies for roading. But we do not need to enshrine it because not only are we going to do it but we are also going to put in $300 million more than we receive in those particular levies. We will put in $300 million more. It is not confined to just the amount that comes in from road-user charges petrol levies and so on; it is $300 million more. 
I would be very interested to hear the National Party tell us tonight whether it will be its policy at the next election to enshrine in legislation that all revenue that comes in through those mechanisms will be used on the roads. I would like to hear that commitment from members opposite. They have made two speeches about that tonight and made a big play of it. So I would like to know whether that will be their policy. Well I know what their policy was at the last election. They said they would consider putting all the road user charges the motor vehicle fees and the petrol levy into roads over a 6-year period. They did not say that they would do it or were committed to it; their policy was that they would consider it over a 6-year period. I am very pleased that this Government has been able to put in not only that money but additional money as well. 
The member Maurice Williamson raised the issue of the Resource Management Act and the need for us to build roads faster. I agree with him that we need to get on and build the roads we need in New Zealand. But I am told that the Resource Management Act is not the problem. The problem in the past has been having no money and having no commitment to getting the money—the fact is the previous National Government did not put in the money for it to happen. When National finally decided to put in a road it took one hell of a long time. So I say to the member that there are people in New Zealand who want to be consulted when a road is going to go through their community. There is no way we will be able to fast track their right to have some say over whether a road goes through their community. 
I am actually quite confused about where the National Party stands on these issues of public consultation. We are trying to get extra electricity to Auckland—[ 
Interruption 
]—especially for Mr Worth; he needs to be lit up. We are trying to get some extra electricity to Auckland. Well what is happening with the National Party? National Party members of Parliament are petitioning against the ability to put more power into Auckland. Under the Resource Management Act they are petitioning against electricity for Auckland. Where do they stand? They are at sixes and sevens on this issue. I have to say that Maurice Williamson does not agree with them but he is stuck with those Luddites who are lions in their own patch but when they come down here we never hear from them. 
Dr Richard Worth 
: Time to sit down Minister you have gone on long enough—we’re happy. 
Hon ANNETTE KING 
: Oh the member is very happy tonight. He is a very happy member and is really enjoying himself tonight. 
Another issue raised by Maurice Williamson is the ability to have private sector funding for transport. Let us clarify that matter—and I think this is also in answer to David Bennett as well. He said that this Government is ideologically opposed to having private sector funding in the roads of New Zealand. Well I think National was in Government for 9 long years and in that time did those members pass legislation to allow private funding of roads? Did they allow one single private funder to build roads in New Zealand? No they did not. But now that they are in Opposition we are being told that we are opposed to it. 
It was this Labour-led Government that passed the legislation in 2003 that does allow for private funding of roads. I welcome a proposal that comes to me to sign off as Minister of Transport that has some private funding of roads—I say: “Bring it on!”. But it is only because of this Labour-led Government that legislation that allows that to happen is on the books. Those members talk big in Opposition and do nothing in Government. Why did they not pass the legislation when they were in Government and why did they not build a single road with private money? There is silence from the Opposition benches. 
Let us move to David Bennett the new eager member for Hamilton East. Do people know that people in the Waikato after getting peanuts or nothing from the last National Government for their roads for year after year after miserable year—in fact the National Party did not even know how to spell “Waikato”—finally in Budget 2006 have been given what that member called a miserly sum of money: $214 million. I would have thought that was a pretty good sum of money particularly as it came out of a joint officials group’s work where they set out their priorities. The Government has come in behind it and put up the money. What an ungrateful member that person is because I can tell him that there is no way he would have got that money under a National Government. The member would have been dog tucker because as a marginal seat member he would not have got anything out of a National Government because it would have spent it all if people remember on tax cuts—and tax cuts do not pay for roads. 
So I say to that member that I believe people in the Waikato are very lucky and long may they have a Labour-led Government that will look after them. But it is not only them; many many communities around New Zealand have benefited from the money this Government is putting into roading and transport in general in this Budget and over the next 5 years. 
A party vote was called for on the question  
That Vote Transport be agreed to. 
Ayes 61 
New Zealand Labour 50; New Zealand First 7; United Future 3; Progressive 1. 
Noes 48 
New Zealand National 48. 
Abstentions 9 
Green Party 6; Maori Party 3. 
Vote Transport agreed to. 
Vote Economic Industry and Regional Development 
KATHERINE RICH (Chairperson of the Commerce Committee): 
 It is a shame that the Minister for Economic Development Trevor Mallard is not able to sit in the chair but we are glad that Annette King has opted to stand in. I am sure she will be very interested in what the Opposition has to say. The economic development budget area is quite a huge area—some $286 million dollars is spent on it each year. This area actually had a 21 percent decrease in the amount put to this Budget. The Opposition did not jump up and down about that mainly because the value for money we are getting out of this portfolio at the moment is so poor and we have officials who are not able to tell us what value many of the programmes the country is currently funding have; whether they work; and when if at all we will get a result for the investment that New Zealanders are making in the area of economic development. 
There has been a lot of documented evidence that in fact many of the programmes have not been working at all. Members will remember the audit report of 2004 and also the Ministry of Economic Development report last year which stated that spending was poor that we did not know what we were getting for our investment and that there was a lot of wastage in this area. 
To be honest I feel a bit sorry for Trevor Mallard in some circumstances because when he took over from Jim Anderton this entire portfolio was a mess. Jim Anderton’s view of economic development was that he just took a pot of cash travelled the country handing out oversized cheques said “cheese” and got his photo in the local paper. His view of economic development was not grounded anywhere in academic thinking practical thinking or in fact sound economic policy. So when Minister Mallard took over he found that well over 50 business development grant programmes existed that businesses did not know about many of them—he had not been aware of some of them himself—and that some outcomes were so poor they begged the question why we were funding some of these programmes in the first place. 
But I have to say that the Minister has not done a very good job of explaining why he has cut some programmes. The cluster development programme is one that we on this side of the Chamber thought was working quite well. The Minister has since slashed the regional initiative fund the Strategic Investment Fund and the enterprise training scheme. He has done so without much fanfare but that is basically because he has been cleaning up Labour’s mess. All of those programmes were initiated post-1999. They were set up in a hurry some with no thinking behind them and that is why a lot of officials’ reports have concluded that some of them simply do not work. No evidence existed that some of those programmes would work in the first place and they certainly have not. 
It is an important issue for our country to look at the reasons why some of the programmes have not worked. The Strategic Investment Fund was hailed by Jim Anderton as a vital ingredient in this country’s economic policy. Only 3 months before the end of the last financial year only 3 percent of that funding had been spent. Why? Because overseas investors were not considering New Zealand as a viable option for their investment. New Zealand Trade and Enterprise has told the Opposition that it simply was not getting applications. New Zealand did not cut the mustard as an investment destination. Why? Because this Government seeks to regulate as opposed to looking at non-regulatory options. It meddles in business affairs and since 1999 it has put in place over 2000 more regulations than had previously existed. 
So I think that that in the long term has put a lot of business investors off. New Zealand is not looked at as a good destination for money at the moment. That is why that scheme will be canned—simply because not enough investors were looking at New Zealand to be able to draw from the fund. 
We know that the Ministry of Economic Development is a mess but Minister Mallard has chosen to expand programmes in some areas such as the market development schemes even though we have no evidence that even those will work. I know that in his heart of hearts the Minister knows that a $70000 grant to a Christchurch school to teach entrepreneurship was never a good investment of this country’s money. No child will suddenly become an entrepreneur simply because he or she is able to say the three-times table in rap. That is what this country has paid for and the whole area is now a mess. 
MARK BLUMSKY (National) 
: 
 It is nice to have this opportunity to speak to the appropriation for Vote Economic Industry and Regional Development. First up it is a very good opportunity for me to give some plaudits to those who work in that area. The Ministry of Economic Development may sometimes wonder given the number of questions we ask of it whether we are rather anti. That is not the case. Many things being done through organisations like New Zealand Trade and Enterprise are making a difference. 
When we read about the programmes the vote is focused on we have to say that some good things are happening like the programme to lift the capacity of firms to innovate. I have been personally involved in setting up a number of incubators funded through that programme. They have made a fantastic difference to high-growth start-ups and I applaud those initiatives. Building the connection of firms with international markets—the Beachheads programme—is a wonderful initiative which introduces New Zealand companies to international markets by helping them set up bases offshore. 
In lifting the skills and talents of the work force many training programmes are making a contribution and a difference to the economic development of New Zealand. So much within this appropriation of $286 million is making a good difference to New Zealand and some very good people inside organisations like New Zealand Trade and Enterprise are working hard with companies to help them grow. 
But it is interesting to look at what the overview for this appropriation says about evaluation. It states that if economic development is to work for New Zealand it has to be implemented effectively and that complex judgments determine which interventions may make a difference and which may not be beneficial. I feel it is very relevant to raise the issue of effective implementation as in the overview document because Minister Mallard like us noticed very early in the piece—when Katherine Rich Chris Tremain and I started to look at programmes in December and January—that many programmes had many problems. We started to raise those concerns with the appropriate parties—and what did the Minister do in about February or March? He said he thought we had better have a review of those programmes because he like the National Party members had noticed that some were not working and that it was necessary to make sure they were being implemented appropriately. 
One programme that has not worked very well—I say this because our job is to hold the Government accountable when it spends significant amounts of taxpayers’ money—is the attempt by New Zealand Trade and Enterprise to invest in retail. I will focus particularly on why on earth the Government has wanted to invest in setting up a retail operation in Hong Kong. I have no issue with the Government looking to help companies enter markets like Asia but it was interesting to see reports over the weekend of a discussion now taking place within New Zealand Trade and Enterprise that says we should not look at entering China via Beijing Shanghai or Hong Kong. We will not succeed in those markets because they are too busy. Those markets—Beijing Shanghai Hong Kong—are too big and too busy. If New Zealand is to make a successful entry into China it should look at regional China. It should look at cities like Xiamen in the Fujian Province because it is there in those smaller cities that it will be able to make a difference. It is fascinating then that the New Zealand Government is investing $1.4 million and has an annualised spend of $1.3 million in a retail store in Hong Kong. 
I have been told that the location of the retail store is very poor. It makes sense that that location is poor because the Government does not understand or get itself involved in retail. It has no expertise in retail so it makes a heck of a lot of sense that when the Government wants to open up a retail store and does it on its own recognisance it will open it up in a poor location. The Minister in answer to a question said recently that the location is satisfactory. It was most interesting that in answer to a personal question to me earlier he had said that the New Zealand focus in Hong Kong served as a “high-profile site”. Yet after we started asking questions in the House he changed his mind and in a different answer said: “I am advised the location is satisfactory.” The fascination about that is that I have met a number of people who have visited Hong Kong and who have asked me “Where in the hell is this store? We can’t find it.” I suppose I am talking about this because the overview paper for Vote Economic Industry and Regional Development says that if economic development is to work effectively for New Zealand it has to be implemented effectively. The New Zealand Government opening up retail stores on its own in Hong Kong at a huge cost to the taxpayer is not what I would call successful implementation. 
The Minister has just done a review of the growth services programme as part of his review and as part of the Budget. I put the Minister on notice that although we have mentioned that many good things are coming out of the programme one of the things we will watch with great interest is the growth services range. There is a series of programmes adding up to a cost of $57 million and the Minister’s own people are saying they are not sure whether results are coming out at the other end. They are investing money in the programmes but they are not sure about them. There is $57 million worth of “unsure if they are working” programmes because we do not know how to measure them very well at all. The Minister has recognised that in a review and we on this side of the Chamber have also recognised a weakness with those programmes. The Minister’s officials have identified the weakness and we will be watching with interest to see how he manages to make changes to ensure much better “effective implementation”. 
Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE (Minister for Building Issues) 
: 
 On behalf of the Minister I rise to take a short call on this vote. I do note the history in terms of regional development—I will deal with that first—of the National Government in the 1990s. It was a policy that we would have to say sold out the regions by withdrawing services and support from them and as a result—and the economic figures stand for themselves—growth in our regions plummeted through the 1990s. There was no growth. There was negative growth and huge unemployment as we know. 
We will look at the facts not the rhetoric from the Opposition. I note that Katherine Rich spent 5 minutes criticising our regional development policy. She came up with no policy or ideas of her own but hey we are becoming used to that. But let us now look at what we did. Who opened up the heartland centres? We did. Who rejuvenated the regions injected wealth into them supported them and provided services for them? As a result of that and as a result of hard-working Kiwis in those regions if we go to places like the West Coast or Invercargill or if we go to any regional area around the country or to the far north we see those places are booming. That is a fact. That is the stark difference between us and those members over there in the Opposition—the whingers who pour scorn on a Government policy that works but of course never provide any alternatives to it. 
 I now turn to Mr Blumsky the eminent New Zealander former Mayor of Wellington and great success who sort of tripped over fell down and ended up in Parliament or down some stairs. He was tripped up by a mirror I suspect. He is the man who is very experienced and qualified to talk about business practice and economics after having led a failed pizza parlour and a failed shoe business. I am told that at one point Mr Blumsky declared that he was chief executive officer of Norsewear in Hawke’s Bay. That proved to be a little odd because he was a consultant or something. Yet tonight he stood up and told us the secret of his success and waxed eloquent about business practice and regional development. 
I say to Mr Blumsky about the New Zealand Focus centre in Hong Kong that one can find it. He should open his eyes. I was there last week. I went in with one of our diplomats and looked at it. I spoke to some of the customers and people in there and it is a fantastic state-of-the-art site. Of course Mr Blumsky may not like it. He may not like the fact that we invest in one of the biggest economic portals in Asia. Hong Kong is a growing gateway to China and other places. He may not like that centre because as has been pointed out by my colleague Mr Mallard it has something to do with him promoting a competitor or his mates. We are not interested in doing that; we are interested in standing up and having a go at a damned good project. The New Zealand Focus centre is a good prototype that has a heck of a lot of traction. I have been there. Mr Blumsky should go and look at it. He should go and look at the state-of-the-art equipment the promotion of education and the promotion of New Zealand food and products. He might note that a heck of a lot of expats live in Hong Kong and that word has spread about the centre. 
But what would Mr Blumsky do if he were the Minister responsible for regional development and trade? It is possible that he might open a shoe shop in Hong Kong. That would not work; it did not work in Wellington. Mr Blumsky might open a pizza parlour or a pizza business in Hong Kong. That did not work here but it might work there although I doubt it. But Mr Blumsky waxes eloquent—he does so authoritatively and with a great amount of skill and experience—about his great lineage in business. 
Mr Blumsky lectured us and told us what a dismal failure the New Zealand Focus centre is in his opinion. I do not know about other people but I would back the big successful companies like Fisher and Paykel that are in there—they are not a failed Al Bundy shoe salesman—against Mr Blumsky’s experienced and skilled opinion about whether the New Zealand Focus centre in Hong Kong is working. I say that it is. I say that it is again an example of innovation and of the Government going out and testing new ideas and looking at new ways to promote New Zealand. This is not a Government that goes out and asks what the best way is to promote its mates. I wonder whether Mr Blumsky has actually been to the New Zealand Focus centre. He said he could not find it; he said he did not know where it was. 
Darren Hughes 
: It was the wrong time of night. 
Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE 
: It was the wrong time of night: the bars were still open and he was still standing. 
I say to National members that they should put up or shut up. They can have a go at our appropriations at the estimates and at the funding. I see Simon Power is looking contemplative but National members have not brought up one alternative policy. I see the old feather duster wandering around over there in the Opposition. He waxed eloquent today on regional development at Local Government New Zealand. I am told he made a hash of it and is being counselled by his mates in the National Party. If ever there was a relic it stands over there in the Opposition. 
ANNE TOLLEY (Junior Whip—National) 
: 
 I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I am not sure whether I heard the Minister correctly but if he made a disparaging comment about one of our members in particular our leader I think that was most inappropriate and I ask him to withdraw and apologise. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Clem Simich) 
: No I listened very carefully. It may have been clear to some but the speaker did not actually identify even closely the person he was talking about. 
Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE (Minister for Building Issues) 
: 
 I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Clem Simich) 
: It had better be helpful. 
Hon CLAYTON COSGROVE 
: It will indeed. I must come clean. I was indeed talking about the leader of the National Party Don Brash and for that I do withdraw and apologise. 
DARREN HUGHES (Junior Whip—Labour) 
: 
 I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I am sorry to interrupt you but during your ruling the list member Jackie Blue called out a swear word and directed it at another member in the Chamber—and if the National Party junior whip is going to be so sensitive about what people say in here then we will not have people sitting in the wrong seat throwing swear words around. 
The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Clem Simich) 
: I am sorry to interrupt the member but the time has come for me to report progress. 
Progress reported. 
Report adopted.