Hughes Gareth: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHughes Gareth: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 11 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:8940. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. Prime Minister I have sat and I have listened to all your speeches opening Parliament and I would like to congratulate you on delivering your eighth. It is a real accomplishment and you must now be thinking how history will remember you.Just outside this Chamber are the portraits of our great political leaders from Seddon to Savage from Fraser to Kirk. How do these giants who established universal suffrage and a caring State in the midst of the Great Depression and a world war and who built a modern independent bicultural New Zealand compare with you? Is the flag it? Your desperate lumbering grasping attempt at building a legacy with a flag will not mask the realities. Hungry kids up; inequality up; pollution up; electricity costs up; housing costs up; foreign ownership up; debt up; corruption up.You might have once been a national leader but now you are looking like a National Party leader. Once you attacked the nanny State of efficient lightbulbs but then presided over the most wide-reaching mass surveillance network of our country’s history. You passed the Skynet law under urgency sacked elected councils then refused elections.You are our first selfie PM our first comedian PM—a derping planking rape-joking expert at getting us on American late-night comedy shows. At a time of growing inequality rapid global change and systemic economic problems we basically got a chilled-out entertainer as a Prime Minister.On election night 2011 you first and foremost thanked your pollster. You are our most poll-driven Prime Minister yet after all these years we still do not know what you stand for bar the jokes and the three-line slogans.Do you see more for New Zealand than just China’s dairy farm and America’s spy station? Prime Minister why just last week on our national day did you run from debate at Waitangi into the arms of rugby players? To the 300000 Kiwi kids growing up in poverty do you really say: “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for Skycity Serco Saudi sheikhs MediaWorks Rio Tinto.”?Under your leadership scientists have been ridiculed and silenced and NGOs have had their funding and voice cut. Rape crisis centres are closing and food banks are doing a brisk trade. Kiwis are known for their generosity and their hospitality but Prime Minister under you New Zealand has become more welcoming to oil companies than to refugees. Whenever there was a Government scandal there were extreme benefit measures floated and: “Hey look pandas!”.Prime Minister you may not have a plum in your mouth like your political hero Holyoake but you are exactly the same—an arrogant born-to-rule out-of-touch short-term “kick it down the road” style of leadership. You delivered tax cuts the country could not afford and you are leaving $120 billion in national debt a superannuation crisis crippling student loans and a generation locked out of homeownership. You may call that a legacy; I call it intergenerational theft.Once we were one of the richest nations in the world yet now Kiwis work some of the longest hours for some of the lowest wages and pay some of the highest costs of living in the OECD. After selling our assets you are now selling out our sovereignty to corporates and the Hollywood industrial complex. Your small army of spin doctors tells us again and again how you grew up in a State house but now that you are on the ninth floor you are even selling them too.But you do seem like a good guy to have a beer with and no one else in this room could have got away with your antics and your gaffes. How have you got away with it? Well we could ask Crosby/Textor and we could also point to the biggest of big business bucks and the dirtiest of dirty tricks operations in this country’s history. But Kiwis are a good people a caring people and we can reclaim our democracy from dirty politics and big money.One of your legacies—what you cynically call the rent a crowd—is growing into a real movement for political change. Another legacy is a Green Party bigger and stronger than ever before. Thank you Prime Minister.Prime Minister as you reflect this may be one of your last opening speeches to Parliament. I have no doubt that you will go down in history as one of the most successful politicians of a generation but by that I mean “politician” in the sense used on the Stuff comment threads.