Brownlee Gerry: General Debate 
Brownlee Gerry: General Debate 
[Volume:630;Page:2067] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (Deputy Leader—National) 
: 
 I move  
That the House take note of miscellaneous business 
. Following the resignation yesterday of the honourable David Parker this House had a debate about the matter. There were two speeches that I think were reasonably well quoted by various media commentators: one from Jeanette Fitzsimons and the other in part at least from the Rt Hon Winston Peters. They raised the question about whether this House was headed in a direction that was to say the least unsavoury and worrying—whether individual members could expect to have their backgrounds raked over whether they could expect all sorts of investigations into their past and other such matters. 
I think those speeches missed the point slightly. It is not muckraking to ask the Prime Minister how $446000 of her leader’s budget ended up in the Labour Party campaign. It is not muckraking to ask the Prime Minister how five policemen and a civilian driver could end up in the dock for speeding while she did not notice that the speed of the car was 160 kilometres. It is not muckraking to suggest that misleading Parliament is a serious matter and it is not muckraking to ask how the falsification of a document came about. Those matters have been before this House and they are not matters that should be swept aside easily. I say to this House particularly to the Labour members who have had so much to say about those matters that if they want respect they will have to start showing it. 
I think that anyone who looked at today’s question time would see why the House has deteriorated in the way that it has. If one looked at the way in which Government Ministers dealt with question time today it was clear there was no desire on the part of Ministers to give serious answers to serious issues when the rightful role of the Opposition to scrutinise their portfolios was exercised. 
The Prime Minister today refused to say what she thought of the Whangamata decision. She hid behind a pathetic answer saying that the Minister of Conservation had followed a process. That virtually pushes the Minister out and hangs him out to dry. There was no group responsibility whatsoever. 
Dr Nick Smith decided he should ask Dover Samuels what he had meant when he said he thought the Minister of Conservation had acted inappropriately. We know that Dover Samuels had a heck of a lot more to say and that most of that was said inside the Labour caucus room but publicly he had questioned the right of the Minister to make that decision. And it is our role to ask why he did that. 
Why is it that a Minister can make an important public decision only to be questioned by another Minister? What we got was this idea that because the first Minister had a different coloured hat on at the time he made those statements he is exempt from being questioned about that matter in the House. That is an utter nonsense. 
Is there a point when a Minister walks out of this place during the day or the night and is no longer considered a Minister? I do not think Lianne Dalziel would agree with that. I do not think Ruth Dyson would agree with that. I do not think poor old Dover himself if he really asked himself the question would agree with that. So what happens is a level of frustration brews up inside the Opposition and of course we have a degree of disorder occurring in the House. 
A question was asked of the Hon Harry Duynhoven. It was a simple question: were there any bids for the latest round of gasfields that were on offer? The answer that came back in any form one likes was to get him out of answering simply that no no one was interested. 
For how long will we have people writing articles about the way in which the House appears and the business the House is supposedly preoccupied with while ignoring the fact that Ministers are not exercising their responsibility to be accountable to the public of this country? It does take us away from considering the big issues that face this nation. The looming energy crisis is right on our back-doorstep and we have a Minister of Energy who does not want to know about it.