Peters Winston: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumePeters Winston: General Debate[Sitting date: 19 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16811. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS (Leader—NZ First):The milk has gone sour. Let us look at the facts of the Collins-Oravida saga. Oravida arranged a dinner in Beijing last year. It invited a senior and influential New Zealand Government Minister Judith Collins. It invited a senior Chinese border official. This was not some spontaneous last-minute casual brief encounter. This was an intentional business meeting.The public is being asked to swallow that this Minister had nothing to do with Oravida’s business but Oravida’s business is a matter of great consequence for her husband a director of the company. Judith Collins kept this meeting under wraps covertly before going to China. She covered it up and omitted to mention it to the Prime Minister when the story broke. She left it out of her trip report. How very convenient it was for her to do that! What was actually happening was that she was covering up her tracks—her connection to a business meeting that was about securing advantage and benefit for Oravida.This smells to high heaven. We have the Cabinet Manual for a reason. It is to avoid the very situation that Minister Collins is now in. It is to protect the public from corrupt practice but sensible Ministers know that it is also to protect them. Judith Collins has committed one of the most glaring examples of conflict of interest and breach of the Cabinet Manual in recent New Zealand history. It does not get any more black and white. The irony is that she was of course over there officially to talk to this group in China—and it was all part of her report—the China Executive Leadership Academy in Pudong. And what was she talking about? She was talking about a “culture of openness and transparency. [The] law provides mechanisms for the public to find out what different branches of the government are doing.” She goes on to say more: “We believe that this builds trust and confidence in our system.”If she or the Prime Minister had any actual sense of decency they would ensure that she was no longer a Minister. The irony is that the ostensible reason for Judith Collins’ official trip to China was to talk about probity and principle in Government affairs in that speech. When a Minister flaunts and ignores the Cabinet Manual there must be consequences. The Prime Minister must take the ultimate responsibility for the failure of his Minister. He should have asked his Minister where the standards were where the care was where the integrity was where the probity was where the scrupulous attention to ethical standards was because all were missing.John Key talked about there being a new standard under his leadership—oh how he loved to talk about that. Well the only standard we have seen is a double standard. If you are Pansy Wong or Richard Worth you are down the road. If you are Judith Collins you are as right as rain. Let us not beat about the bush here. The Prime Minister has been severely embarrassed by Judith Collins. He has been up on the ninth floor blushing away. But it begs the question: why has he not sacked her? What is he so afraid of about this milkmaid from Oravida? That is what she has been engaged in behind everybody’s backs back in this country. Now the big question in Parliament is what Judith Collins has got on John Key for him to be too scared to act. The Prime Minister looks weak. He looks out of touch. He is sitting on his hands while Oravida’s milkmaid runs about making a laughing stock of him. So Key must accept that this Government is contaminated infected with the taint and smell of corruption from Oravida’s milkmaid.New Zealand First says that this matter is not going to go away. New Zealand does not need Ministers who serve themselves; it needs Ministers who serve New Zealand. And as for the attack that she made on me let me just say this: Mike Williams a former president of the Labour Party made it very clear that those members’ allegations about me were false and he put it out—[Interruption] It is all in the article. If those members want to contest this then why not go to the reports from the Privileges Committee? Remember three drafts say that if Winston Peters wins this petition he becomes the member of Parliament and the pecuniary interest there is that he gets an electorate member’s salary except that that is not the law. A successful petition would have been a by-election so it was demonstrably false. I pointed it out to them and they pulled that out and checked the same finding.Hon Amy Adams: Get over it. Move on.Rt Hon WINSTON PETERS: Let me tell Minister Adams over there that she is the last person who should attack Winston Peters because I know something about her landholdings and her associations with the water supply in her part of the region. It reeks of corruption—reeks of it—and the public are going to hear more of that.