Jones Shane: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Jones Shane: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:660;Page:8682] 
Hon SHANE JONES (Labour) 
: 
 A kia ora ano tatou. E te Kaihautu o te Whare tena koe i tenei tau hou me o tatou hoa e noho mai ra tae atu ki a tatou nga mema katoa o te Whare. 
[ 
Greetings once again to us all. Greetings of this new year to you Mr Speaker of the House and to our colleagues sitting over there and to all of us members of the House 
.] 
We have an innovation in the House in that members—in particular some members from Hawke’s Bay—will have the benefit of understanding what their Maori colleagues are saying as we leap from one language to the other. But unfortunately never mind what language we use it will not change the hurt and sorrow within New Zealand families as a consequence of what the Prime Minister has delivered aided by Mr Rodney Hide and aided by the Maori Party. You see underlying the Prime Minister’s delivery is a narrative and the people who are largely applauding his statement are applauding the fact that taxes will be decreased. But in decreasing taxes to support John Key’s constituency he has no other option but to raise GST. There will be elegant arguments that we have to put GST up because it catches all of us as citizens who are in the business of buying things etc. But the reality is that if we introduce a system of changes where revenue goes down then as night follows day we are forced substantially to reduce expenditure. This Government underlying the coded message in its speech is really about shrinking the size of government—in particular those key areas of social services and dealing with those needs of vulnerable New Zealanders. 
But perversely enough National also talks about having research and development and putting some more money into capital inadequacy issues in the economy. But it will not admit to reducing revenue and introducing it through tax cuts so we are shrinking the amount of funding that the State has at its disposal to run the current services that we take for granted. 
So there is a transformational agenda to what the Prime Minister has outlined but it is bad for working people. It is extremely bad for those who have children or use most of their income to buy bread milk rugby boots netball shoes and the things that Kiwis take for granted they will be able to afford. That is the first point. 
The other point is that this Prime Minister has in a sense conned the country. He has come forward promising transformational change without pain. He has come forward smiling virtually walking on water. He has been aided and abetted by a besotted media. But this shows that his statement has no content to deal with the daily drudgery and the very dangerous problems facing families with children and families on low income. It might be said that they are not the people who voted him in. They are not the people he is answerable to. He is answerable to those who lie at the heart of his constituency. They do not include poor people or people largely on fixed incomes. So he has to use this statement to reward those who have propelled him into power. But he is dicing with fire. New Zealanders who are worried about whether their kids will get jobs and will be adequately trained cannot take much more of this pressure. They will not all go out of New Zealand to Australia. They will look for us to provide alternative ideas. 
Let us look at some of those ideas and ask where the jobs are. There are multiple opportunities up and down the country to work with firms to work with communities and to create jobs. It is jobs that integrate people back into the economy when they leave school and assume the positions that their parents have had. I mistakenly thought that with all the experts that this man has had at his disposal he would have more ideas. He has had the Capital Market Development Task force. He has had Don Brash and his heretics. He has had my friend Rob McLeod and he has had people such as John Shewan and others working on tax. He had them all at his disposal. He left the New Zealand public last year with the impression that he had all those experts around him so the public should just taihoa. He would glean the best of what they had to say and then he would cobble it together and make a compelling story that would affect a step change in the economy. 
There is no step change—none whatsoever. There are small nuggets and code language for what the Government proposes to do. It will take an axe without a doubt to what we regard as the entitlements of New Zealand citizenry in relation to welfare. Unless it makes cuts in that particular area it will not be able to afford the State with a vastly reduced level of income. It is afraid of saying that but rest assured that that is the deeper agenda. 
Secondly it will have to go ahead with privatisation. At least we have seen the truth. There are two examples. The first is where it will run prisons privately and then schools will soon find themselves in that position—certainly those schools that are manipulated used and abused as a consequence of this ideological drive called standards. It is inversely related to any established educational research. It is pinned purely now on the Prime Minister. He had a chance to moderate it but he is insistent that this will be his signature piece and its agenda is to harass and hound schoolteachers and close down schools. 
I shall turn for a portion of my speech to a saying that I recall—[ 
Interruption 
]. I am not sure whether that was Amy Adams calling out the person who is secretly plotting scheming and having all sorts of meetings with the Mackenzie investors whilst her senior colleague is trying to tell us that there will be no huge pollution in the Mackenzie Basin while she is quietly meeting with them and encouraging them. Do not to worry—we know all about that and the emails are being delivered to us. We have a situation where whilst National is endeavouring to provide a façade of being green and friendly key members from that part of the country have been meeting and encouraging those very investors for a long long time. National thought it would get that one past us. 
Anyhow let me move on to more serious matters rather than the short and uneventful career of that member from the Mackenzie Basin. There is a famous saying which I think it might have been Hone Harawira’s mother whom I heard use. It is that when poverty comes in the front door love goes out of the back door. Those Maori Party members are now the agents of assistance and facilitation to bringing greater poverty to the families they purport to represent. Herein lies the monstrous conundrum the riddle: they spent 3 years attacking us—that is fair enough; we are politicians; we need to be attacked—but they seem to think that by consistently talking about trinkets and trophies we are not going to put the acid on the Maori Party during the course of this year to account for their conduct in the area of jobs schooling and key other features that give people the confidence that they can go through a week of life without having to wonder from whereabouts the next dollar will come from and how to get the next item that their family needs. 
I have come in for a very unfair level of criticism from those members because apparently we are not meant to criticise the Maori Party. Apparently we might need it in the future. Well firstly that statement and that attitude of conceit makes me feel that the sooner it does go the better. Democracy and politics in this place are a contest of ideas. If I have said it once I have said a thousand times that the ideas the Maori Party represents will be put under scrutiny—they will be challenged. We do not wish it any particular injury of a personal nature but it is promoting a falsehood. Whanau Ora will be just a big money grab which was initially for Maori alone but is now a guise for bringing in ideological fascinations such as privatisation of welfare. It reminds me of that lost nun who came here in Jenny Shipley’s time from Wisconsin. It is providing cover for an ideological experiment that will have a dangerous impact on the people whom it represents or purports to represent. So the Maori Party is fair and open game. 
Hon Clayton Cosgrove 
: Where are they? 
Hon SHANE JONES 
: Well we know where they are. Hone Harawira is checking that it was not a conflict of interest but an investment interest he might have had over the flag. Pita Sharples is checking what the meaning of “Whoops” is. Tariana Turia is checking how she is going to explain there is no Whanau Ora and Te Ururoa Flavell is explaining why they will get a Clayton’s title rather than a seabed title. Kia ora tatou.