Davis Kelvin: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDavis Kelvin: General Debate[Sitting date: 25 March 2015. Volume:704;Page:2588. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KELVIN DAVIS (Labour—Te Tai Tokerau):This Government is a bit of a shambles. It is stumbling from scandal to fiasco and back to scandal again. Let me just list a number of the fiascos and botch-ups that it has made. It has botched up the Northland by-election. The by-election which is for an electorate that National has held for decades and decades and decades is slipping through its grasp as we speak. It has absolutely mangled that. It has mangled the roads issue. It has mangled the bridges—the “Simon Bridges” bridges. It has messed up that announcement. It has messed up housing. What about this one: does anyone remember the cycleway—the cycleway that was going to bring jobs to Northland by the thousand? It was going to stretch from the Bay of Islands across to Hokianga—80 kilometres of cycleway. Let me tell you now that if you get on your bike and ride from Ōpua you can ride 7 kilometres. Then you have to get off your bike you have to put it on the back of your truck and you have to drive about 30 kilometres to meet up with the next part of the cycleway. There are no jobs that have been created.David Shearer: How long did that take?KELVIN DAVIS: It has taken 7 years for a 7-kilometre long cycleway.What else has it botched up? It has botched up Tim Groser’s job application for the World Trade Organization. That is part of the scandal that this Government has been involved in. And then there is the reason we are having the by-election in the first place. This by-election should never have happened. I have always wondered why it is that most ambitious policemen get a job in say Kaitāia then they get promoted and go to Whangarei then they get promoted again and they go to a bigger station in Auckland and then maybe they get promoted again and they end up down the road here in Wellington. Instead Mike Sabin started in Whangarei and then his career went in reverse; he went from a big police station down to a small police station. And if the National Party had done its due diligence it would have seen that there were some issues with Mr Sabin.Then there comes the candidate selection. We have heard from Ron Mark over here that National has gone and selected “Hoss Cartwright”—just give the man a stetson and he would look like his twin brother. Not only does he look like Hoss Cartwright but there has also been a bonanza in Northland. There has been a bonanza of bridges—10 double-laned bridges that we have not asked for. Those members would have had a bit more credibility if they had just given us three bridges—but no they are treating us like we are fools. They say: “Here are 10 bridges.” We are all asking: “Ten bridges? Wow that’s fantastic.” We are not going to look a gift horse in the mouth but their own candidate cannot even name the 10 bridges. He could not even name the one that is a hundred metres from his own home. It is not even going to take 5 seconds off the trip from his front door across the river to the Taipā bakery—it is not going to take any time off that. By the end we were thinking: “My gosh after 1 week he’s making a $70 million 10-bridge announcement. Wow this is fantastic! Imagine what he’s going to announce after his second week—maybe an international airport in Te Kao a stadium in Hōreke or a tunnel through the Mangamuka Gorge!”. Anything was possible with this candidate. We even expected him to announce that the capital was going to be moved back to Northland where it started—but no.What Northlanders actually want—if they had bothered to ask us—is stability of roads. In the time of this National Government $36 million has been taken from New Zealand Transport Agency road funding. That is 29 percent of the funding gone. We actually want stability of State Highway 1. If I get in my car at the start of Northland at Wellsford and drive for about half an hour I get to the Brynderwyns. The Brynderwyns are windy on the south side and they have banks that slip down in adverse weather conditions. On the north side they have long and straight curves with passing lanes. We want the south side of the road through the Brynderwyns to be fixed. What does this Government go and do? It has just started to fix the north side which is not broken. Then if we are lucky enough to get over the Brynderwyns to Whangarei there will be a slip at Maromaku on State Highway 1. You now have to go through a little detour. If you get past that detour you get to Kawakawa. When it is raining and stormy Kawakawa gets flooded out and you have to wait for a couple of hours to get over the three bridges. If you get over them you will get to Moerewa and the bottom of Turntable Hill and there will be another flood going on there. It does not matter which road you take up to Kaitāia whether it is State Highway 1 or State Highway 10. There is the Kaeō bridge that gets flooded. There is the Waihou Valley bridge on State Highway 1 that gets flooded. If you double-laned the Kaeō bridge that would be great but it is not going to fix the 500 metres on the north side of that bridge that is flooded.