Woods Megan: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: General Debate[Sitting date: 01 July 2015. Volume:706;Page:4994. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): At the end of question time today we heard the Speaker remind a Minister not to be arrogant. I am waiting for this to be entered into Speakers’ rulings because this is a Government that is arrogant it is a Government that is out of ideas and it is a Government that is out of touch. It is in small-term thinking it is petty stuff and perhaps that was no better exemplified than by the Hon Gerry Brownlee’s contribution in this House this afternoon. Gerry and I we are both from Christchurch so I know that when he says these things he is actually being really nice. I never actually knew that Gerry felt that way about me and that this is his way of being nice. So to hear Gerry though—I mean it is really the equivalent of a sonnet from Christchurch’s own D H Lawrence. To hear Christchurch’s own D H Lawrence talking about deputy leadership we have to consider that Gerry was once deputy leader of the National Party. Gerry was the man who walked the plank with Don Brash. Gerry walked the plank with Don Brash so he knows a thing or two about being a deputy leader. But Gerry to give him his due has achieved quite some feats in Christchurch. The best is the memorial gate at Christchurch International Airport the place that marks where Gerry broke the law and snuck through to catch his plane. It is a very difficult gate to navigate so it is quickly and colloquially becoming known as a Gerry-proof fence. It is certainly I am sure going to keep that Minister at bay.But this is a Government that is failing. Let us have a look at them. There is Murray “Peace in our time” McCully and my colleague David Parker has chronicled in this House many of the things that Mr McCully has been up to. But as my other colleague David Shearer might like to say: “Let him drink milk.” But Murray has a cunning plan. Murray knows that he is on the ropes and Murray knows that peace in the Middle East is not going to be enough. He is going to have to come up with something more to save his reputation so he has come up with a doozy. A demonstration farm in a New York apartment complex is a beachhead for a new breed of sheep with straightened wool. That is his big thing. But he is still currently negotiating the facilitation payments and seeing what he can come up with—and coming up with straighteners. Let us think of this.If there was ever a symbol of how out of touch this Government has got it is a pair of $400 straighteners down at the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment. I am reliably informed that these are Cloud Nine straighteners. For the uninitiated in this House this is a brand of hair straightener—an offshoot of ghd to be specific. Cloud Nine exemplifies this no more. Word on the street is that these straighteners have now blown up. Someone left them on and they have now burnt out—much like this Government. But I have my suspicions. I am thinking that Steven Joyce snuck into the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment in the dead of night aggrieved that the symbol of his reign of power was going to be a pair of Cloud Nine straighteners and he smashed those straighteners to get rid of them because he never really did want his legacy to be a set of hair straighteners.Then of course we have the other “Minister for Everything”—and goodness knows why you would give Nick Smith a pile of things and ask him to sort them out because none of them are sorted out. We have Nick Smith in housing crisis mode and we have his other portfolios absolutely suffering because he is distracted and unable to give them the attention. We literally have a tyre mountain growing in this country which Nick Smith refuses to act on. My only suspicion is that Nick Smith is thinking: “If you leave enough of them to build up I’ll be able to build some more houses there. I’ll call it Crown land I’ll get a busload of journalists I’ll take them around and I’ll tell them that that’s where we are going to build some houses.” He has now dropped the ball on liquid and hazardous waste. I am going to resist the temptation to make jokes about what that might be because this is actually a very serious issue that Nick Smith has dropped the ball on. He is leaving us vulnerable. So if we wanted a symbol of waste in this Government Nick Smith is literally giving it to us. This is a Minister who is failing to manage waste literally. This is a Government that is mired in sleaze. It is mired in scandal it is out of ideas it is out of touch and its greatest legacy is a pair of hair straighteners.