Goff Phil: General Debate 
Goff Phil: General Debate 
[Volume:655;Page:5022] 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Leader of the Opposition) 
: 
 I move  
That the House take note of miscellaneous business 
. Yesterday Prime Minister John Key pulled the corned beef and peas out of the freezer together with the failed ideological policies of the 1990s and brought back Don Brash into the centre of policy making in this country. Through Don Brash’s chairing of the 2025 Taskforce we are about to see a regurgitation of the failed policies of the 1990s. John Key assured the country that this task force would have a narrow role. That was utterly contradicted yesterday by Don Brash who said that everything is on the table. When Don Brash says that everything is on the table we know that means the policies privatising the public assets of this country and privatising the services that he has trotted out for two decades. Why would we not believe that? 
It is not simply the return in isolation of Don Brash. Let us look at who else has come back. We have seen the appointment of Graham Scott a former Secretary to the Treasury under Ruth Richardson and ACT candidate as one of the so-called purchase advisers who was brought back to do a knife job on the Public Service—and alongside him Murray Horn. We have seen the Prime Minister’s close confidant Mark Weldon the head of the New Zealand Exchange talking about privatising State-owned enterprises. It is hard to conceive that he made those comments without talking to the Prime Minister about them first. Then we saw the Secretary to the Treasury John Whitehead who is a good person and was never politicised by the previous Labour Government being brought back by the National Government to do its dirty work and saying the things in public that it does not have the courage to say. 
We are seeing here a consistent agenda to bring back the failed ideologies of the 1990s. John Key has spent the last 3 years trying to convince New Zealanders in order to get elected that he is moderate not ideological and is centre of the road. But what we saw and heard on  
Q+A  
on Sunday was different from what we heard during the election campaign when privatisation was off the agenda. Mr Key got into power and suddenly he is philosophically relaxed about privatisation. 
With Don Brash there are no surprises. What you see is—mostly—what you get. Don Brash is the man who said there should be no minimum wage and that we should pay workers what they could get on the market. He is the one who said the cost of superannuation and benefits was too high and needed to be cut. He is the one who said the radical policies of the 1990s had one thing wrong with them: they did not go far enough. He is the one who said he is happy to see schools and the health service privatised. He said he did not care who owned the schools. Less candidly Dr Brash was prepared to accept secret funding from the extreme fringe group the Exclusive Brethren and lie to the public about that. 
Where does Bill English stand on privatisation? Publicly he was against it during the election campaign. But when somebody held out a tape recorder as he talked to his party hacks at a conference he said he was in favour of privatisation. So we know where Mr English is on this issue as well. 
I am proud that the previous Labour Government brought Air New Zealand back into the public sector. It is now run efficiently and profitably as a company with a majority public shareholding after the private sector had run Air New Zealand into the ground and bankrupted it. At one point I believed that the private sector would do a good job with Air New Zealand. The private sector proved me wrong. Then there was the gift from the National Government to the private sector of New Zealand Rail. National hocked it off to its personal mates and fundraisers at a price below the value of that company. They asset-stripped it and ran down its assets. We had to buy it back so that we had a decent and integrated public transport system.