Cullen Michael: Appropriation (Parliamentary Expenditure Validation) Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
Cullen Michael: Appropriation (Parliamentary Expenditure Validation) Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:634;Page:5840] 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Minister of Finance) 
: 
 I am happy to follow that speaker because now we have heard something very interesting in this debate. We have heard the National Party spokesperson on legal matters arguing that the court should have the right to strike down Acts of Parliament. 
Christopher Finlayson 
: No I didn’t say that. 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN 
: Oh yes he just said precisely that. I thought sooner or later he would fall into that trap in this House— 
Christopher Finlayson 
: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. The Attorney-General must learn to listen very carefully. I said that if Lord Cooke were alive today he would be sorely tempted to pick up words he said in  
Taylor v New Zealand Poultry Board 
. I did not say that that is what we are in favour of. He should learn to listen. 
The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson) 
: Please be seated. Mr Finlayson that is what we call misrepresentation. You cannot raise that while Dr Cullen is on his feet. When his speech is finished under the misrepresentation provisions in the Standing Orders and in  
Speakers’ Rulings 
 you can rise say what you said and say that what the other member said was incorrect. You cannot do it now. 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN 
: So what we have is a member who fully supports—obviously from the tone of his voice from the dripping sincerity that came forth—that Lord Cooke would have struck down this bill but he himself did not support that. Well why on earth did he make the statement? What was the point of making the statement in that respect? What a silly foolish prissy little statement to make in this Committee if he did not actually mean that he thinks courts are able to strike down Acts of Parliament—which would get us into the awful mess that jurisdictions of the United States are in in that regard. 
Let me come back to the point I was making right at the start. There is so much fake sincere anger on the opposite side that it is almost impossible to believe. I am waiting yet again for a lecture on morality from Mr McCully. What else did we have? We had a lecture on the rule of law from Dr Nick Smith. The only person in this House to be convicted of contempt of court comes and lectures us on respect for the rule of law. [ 
Interruption 
] Now we hear Sandra Goudie speaking who last week gave I think the funniest point of order I have ever heard in this House in my 25 years in the place. She seemed to have a brain that was completely disconnected from her vocal chords at that particular point. 
Let us come back to a very simple point. What the National Party cannot demonstrate in trying to justify the position taken by the Auditor-General is that there is a single sentence in the 2005 report that says the then assumed interpretation of the spending rules was wrong. It is nowhere in that report. All that happened is that a year later the Auditor-General said that he had said something like that. But he did not. All he said in that report was that the rules are unclear and need to be clarified after the election and people should obey the rules as they were. It was like a referee during a game of rugby saying what the going-over-the-top rule is then after the game pinging somebody and saying he had breached the rule although no explanation was given at the time. That is what the Auditor-General has done. 
The entire case actually rests upon that point. National Party members are trying to say—and I want to get this very clear—that they are the only party in the House that knew that the interpretation of the rules had changed. Clearly nobody else did. Yet they went ahead and broke the rules as they understood them—the only party to do so. What every other party has said is that the rules were such that the spending was legitimate and the Auditor-General has changed the interpretation of those rules. 
This bill takes us back to the status quo ante in terms of the interpretation of the rules. That is a totally different issue; the issue before this Committee has nothing to do with it. The issue before this Committee is what the rules should be. National Party members say they deliberately broke the rules just as they deliberately broke the GST rules on broadcasting expenditure but they happened not to have—believe it or not—a written contract with their advertising agency for nearly a million dollars worth of expenditure so nothing was traceable. There are no fingerprints because there are no documents—so there could be no fingerprints. I say to Mr Finlayson: “How about that for proper legal procedure?”.