Dean Jacqui: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDean Jacqui: General Debate[Sitting date: 08 May 2013. Volume:689;Page:9646. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JACQUI DEAN (National—Waitaki): How humiliating it must be for them must it not? Despite spending nearly half a million dollars and involving the entire membership of the Labour Party and of the Green Party and most of the unions they were unable to get enough valid signatures on their little petition to try to stop the partial sale of State-owned enterprises. How humiliating for them. Do you know that the Greens spent $91000 of their budget—that is their publicly funded budget; that is the budget allocated to them for parliamentary purposes—buying signatures? Labour allocated 30 hours a week. Labour allocated publicly funded hours of MP time and resources and I would love to hear a more comprehensive list of the public money that Labour spent on this petition. And the unions paid a national coordinator for 3 months to run this petition. What else did they do? All this—Hon Clayton Cosgrove: So what?JACQUI DEAN: “So what?” says Clayton Cosgrove—so what? All this to buy signatures. All this effort and they were way way short with over 110000 signatures counted to be invalid. There were people signing two and three times people not on the electoral roll people who never existed. It is kind of like they thought in their innocence—in their cute little happy innocence—that the Clerk of the House was not going to check. Well the Clerk of the House did check.The Labour-Greens have ripped off the New Zealand public. They have used public funds to buy signatures. They were so lazy they were so arrogant that they did not bother to check that one in four of those signatures—one in four of those signatures—was made up was false was duplicated and was bogus. The Labour-Greens said they had massive support but they did not have massive support. They had to buy that support. Even then—even then with all that effort and all that public money—they have fallen well short of the public support that they needed.Do you know what? The Labour-Greens should try playing within the rules. When the Labour-Greens issued a press release saying they had 393000 genuine signatures guess what? They were wrong. They have been exposed as playing fast and loose with the democratic process and do you know what? They should just apologise. They should apologise to all those New Zealanders whom they tried to dupe. Do you know what? Support that has to be bought is not support that is freely given and therefore is no support at all.Do you know what? The National Government has always been upfront about the policy of partial sales of State-owned enterprises. We campaigned on the policy going into the 2011 election. We played by the rules. We took that policy to the country. What was Labour’s flagship 2011 election policy? What was it? No asset sales. Well guess what? That won—Hon Member: Get GST off fruit.JACQUI DEAN: And GST off fruit. That won it 27 percent of the vote. Our election commitment to the New Zealand public was to protect New Zealand’s economy through a programme of partial sales of energy State-owned enterprises. We went to the country—the National Party went to the country—with a plan to responsibly manage the nation’s finances and to build a more competitive and productive economy and that is what we are doing.Labour on the other hand—well it has kind of lost its way. Labour is opposed to all the initiatives that would create jobs and boost incomes. Labour is increasingly being known out there in the public as the anti-growth party. It is becoming a bit obvious that under the influence of Grant Robertson and Russel Norman the Labour-Greens are shifting ever further ever further ever further to the left. They want to do things like increase the impact of the emissions trading scheme on households to the tune of $500 a year. They want to discount the price of electricity by around $300 a year with a net increase to households of $200 a year. With that kind of “freak-onomics” it is no wonder they are getting increasingly desperate.National’s policy is to responsibly manage the country’s finances and build a competitive and productive economy. It is what we said we would do and it is what we are doing.