Peters Winston: General Debates 
Peters Winston: General Debates 
[Volume:610;Page:7240] 
Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First) 
: 
 The United Future MP the man who sits on the Sensible Sentencing Trust Marc Alexander did not negotiate one of the things mentioned in that speech at the time that that party gave its support to the Labour Party. Enough said! A number of years ago a famous Englishman Winston Churchill said: “The truth is so precious it must be protected by a bodyguard of liars.”—everywhere but here 
He was referring of course to the English Parliament. We New Zealanders claim to live in a democracy and in a democracy Parliament holds the executive accountable. That is done in a number of ways in and throughout Western societies that have had democracy for centuries. One of the most critical means of accountability in Parliament is question time which should be substantial and it should be real. In New Zealand’s Parliament today question time has become a veneer a charade a sham an abject disgrace. For the first time in New Zealand’s political history a Prime Minister is failing constantly to front at question time in Parliament and hitherto she has got away with it. 
This is the Prime Minister Helen Clark who will go anywhere and everywhere for a photo opportunity or for a soft news story—anywhere and everywhere but Parliament. Her first duty is to Parliament and to the people of this country—but she will not front up. She operates in a cocoon of spin and image creation such that her whole public relations image is unrecognisable from the real person—so much so that when she went overseas recently to Asia the people having seen her climb off the plane were still waiting for the Prime Minister whose photograph they held. That is what they pass in the Labour Party as a fair presentation and she thinks she will get away with it. Our warning from New Zealand First to this Parliament and to those who would seek to circumscribe our rights is that she will not succeed in doing that. She will answer in this Parliament this week after a 2-week break only one question and then she will vanish. 
She has been asked countless questions all of which have been wrongly referred to other Ministers and in some cases to Ministers who are not present. That is a disgrace. She has used every parliamentary device to avoid being accountable and she is being protected. She is being shielded and she is being wrongfully cocooned to avoid exposing her most serious shortcoming the inability to front on the political stage as every other leader has done and is required to do both in this country and in every other Western democracy. 
This idea that she can have one public meeting and vanish for the rest of the day and get the 6 o’clock news is going to stop the moment we have an unbiased neutral parliamentary reporting system. This idea that she can avoid coming to this Parliament is going to stop the moment people stop trying to protect her in this House. 
 Today’s question time according to this parliamentary transcript was an abject disgrace. We have the tape and we intend to prove just what a disgrace it was. Members should check the record of question No 6. Mr English was sitting. He had no intention by his own confession—and I am grateful to him that he admitted it—to ask any question yet someone got expelled for demanding his right to ask a question. How can that be explained? 
Members should go and look at the  
Hansard 
 record of the numerous explanations as to how it arose. The fact is that if someone’s behaviour is being objected to parliamentary precedent requires that the objection be at the first available opportunity. That so-called defence is not available to him. It is a disgrace and we will not—unlike other parties—sit here mute without a syllable a sound a mutter or a murmur and put up with it. We have the record and we say that it has to stop. We will not go on being warned every time that there is a challenge to the correct proceedings of Parliament. 
Members should remember this: every warning is a spur to us. Every slight is a motivation to us. We do not intend to put up with it. We know why it is going on. Members can laugh but I know how people are bought off in this Parliament. The venal preferment or promotion elsewhere for their silence constantly contaminates the proceedings of Parliament. We know why it happens but we do not intend to put up with it. In a court of law the person charged with giving evidence is required to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The New Zealand people deserve an apology and so do I.