Collins Judith: General Debate 
Collins Judith: General Debate 
[Volume:641;Page:10924] 
JUDITH COLLINS (National—Clevedon) 
: 
 We had a speech today from an Associate Minister of Health Mita Ririnui in which he said that all the National Party could talk about was cheese toasties in the health system. I wonder where that man was today during question time when my colleague the Hon Tony Ryall pointed out that an 83-year-old woman had been left for 4 days on a trolley in North Shore Hospital without drink without food and without painkillers. This woman had a broken pelvis and suffers from dementia. That Associate Minister of Health did not even know anything about it. It was in the local newspapers and the  
New Zealand Herald 
 and he could not even tell us about it. 
Another Associate Minister of Health could not even keep himself awake long enough to hear about that tragic story today. All he can say is: “What about the cheese toasties?”. It is significantly more important than that; it is about the trust and the support that we give to the health professionals. When we are trying to tell health professionals that they cannot have a cheese toastie between surgery because it is bad for them we are showing them utterly and absolutely no faith whatsoever. 
The public actually care about the health system and they care about interest rates. Have we heard one thing from the Minister of Finance about interest rates and what he is going to do with his Government’s spending to help to bring down those interest rates? We have heard not one word. All we hear from that Minister of Finance is that he is trawling through back issues of the  
Rodney and Waitemata Times 
 a newspaper that even I had not heard about until he raised it—clearly his bedtime reading. That Minister of Finance needs to get his priorities right. The public do not care about what John Key said when he was a seventh-former. What they do care about is what John Key is going to do when he leads us into the election next year and he comes out the Prime Minister of New Zealand. He will be the best Prime Minister this country has ever seen. He is a man who achieves. He is not a man who breeds on the politics of envy like nasty little Michael Cullen. Michael Cullen’s maiden speech in the House was all about how much he hated the farming community and he has gone to every length to show exactly that is where his sentiments are. 
The public of New Zealand care about the education system. They care about the fact that 20 percent of all New Zealand children leave school without being able to read write or do arithmetic to their chronological age and that statistic is even worse for the Maori population. It is a shocking statistic. All that that Minister over there—Steve Maharey who is off preparing his job application to Massey University—can say is “Oh well some kids are doing really well.” Well we know that because the gaps in New Zealand are getting bigger and bigger day in and day out. That is why 730 New Zealanders move permanently to Australia every single week under this Labour Government. 
I will tell members what else New Zealanders care about; they care about child abuse. The people in this country care about child abuse. I have actually had a gutsful of people in the media blaming Maori for child abuse—that is utter rubbish. Child abuse is caused by the people who kill their children beat them and torture them. Those are the people who cause child abuse. Their race is totally irrespective of anything else and I say that because it is true. Why do people do this? Well they certainly are not people like you and me I say to other members. They do not wake up in the morning and think constantly about how they can make life for their children better. These people have no responsibility and no knowledge of what is expected of them. They are riddled with drugs. They are riddled with a crime wave that is right throughout the community and they are also people who spend their entire life waiting for a handout from somewhere and never thinking about the wonderful potential that they have themselves and the wonderful potential that their children have. 
This Government has had no answer to child abuse in this country not one answer except it put David Benson-Pope in charge of it last year and what a disgrace! We heard from Helen Clark that she was going to find clusters of these difficult families. We were going to have clusters everywhere. Apparently Work and Income cannot look up its records to find out itself. And what happened to these clusters? Well they clearly have not made a scrap of difference. Every week almost—it seems to me—we have another story of child abuse. Every 5 weeks a child is killed in this country by his or her supposed caregiver. I say that because the term “caregiver” is such an insult when used for those people. 
I look at law and order which is another issue that New Zealanders care about and they care about it for several reasons. This country is paid for by decent New Zealanders who go about their business not breaking the law looking after their families and doing the right thing. Those people and particularly the poorest people of New Zealand are the people who suffer the most from lawlessness. That is because they do not have monitored alarms. They do not have security firms patrolling the streets. Those people have been left aside by Helen Clark who is only interested in digging up dirt from John Key’s trash cans.