Parker David: Member Vacancy — Epsom Electoral District—Hon John BanksText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeParker David: Member Vacancy — Epsom Electoral District—Hon John Banks[Sitting date: 18 June 2014. Volume:699;Page:18638. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon DAVID PARKER (Deputy Leader—Labour):It is a sad day today but it is also a just day. I am somewhat saddened that when the Leader of the House Gerry Brownlee stood to take a call he did not actually traverse what has led to the resignation of the Hon John Banks. He instead tried to spray accusations around against other people.Hon Tau Henare: It’s coming!Hon DAVID PARKER: What is that?Hon Tau Henare: It’s coming!Hon DAVID PARKER: It is coming? Well I am happy to traverse the facts of this. The Labour Party will be supporting the motion that no writ be issued for a by-election in the Epsom Electoral District. It would be ridiculous to have a by-election at this stage but it is important that we have a clean democracy. One of the ways that you have a clean democracy is that you have transparency of what goes wrong and people are held to account for their mistakes.That is what has happened here. Mr Banks failed to make declarations of donations received during his mayoral campaign some years back when he was standing for re-election as Mayor of Auckland and did not succeed. But during that period he received donations from a number of parties including Skycity and Dotcom he filed a declaration to say that he did not know of those donations and a court has found that he did. That is why we are here today.I think this episode brings into stark relief what happens when there are what I think are effectively abuses of the Electoral Act. The litany of mistakes by the ACT Party which has led it to this place goes back a number of members and for a number of years. They were here in this place this time only because of the deal that was done with the National Party including in respect of the “tea party” which I will come to. You have to go back only 3 years and the ACT Party was already mired in controversy. The ACT Party was on its knees because its prior leader Rodney Hide the so-called perk buster was busted for perks. He had around him David Garrett. David Garrett had railed against short sentences and name suppression and was shown to be a hypocrite because he had obtained name suppression and discharge without conviction for passport fraud. He had stolen the identity of a dead baby and obtained a passport using it. He had been pushed on to the ACT Party by the Sensible Sentencing Trust whose members including Garth McVicar had supported him in those efforts to get a discharge without conviction and name suppression. It was against that background that the ACT Party was in such a terrible state of affairs that it suffered a takeover from a septuagenarian Don Brash who was not even a member of their party.Hon Christopher Finlayson: Don’t be ageist.Hon DAVID PARKER: It was actually a description Mr Finlayson. So neither of them were members of the ACT Party at that time but they saw political advantage to help the National Party. Remember that Don Brash was a former leader of the National Party and John Banks was a former National Minister. They saw advantage for the National Party and so they took over the ACT Party even while they were not members.The ACT Party then stood in Epsom. I stood in the Epsom electorate. We had the embarrassing spectacle of Paul Goldsmith caught pulling out his own electoral hoardings—he was photographed doing it—and then the signal was sent to the electors of the Epsom electorate that they should not vote for the National Party candidate but should vote rather for the ACT Party candidate in an attempt to use the single-seat lifeboat provision in the MMP legislation. That legislation says that you normally have to get 5 percent of the seats in order to get representation in Parliament. If you get one seat you get the proportion of your seats even if you get less than 5 percent. So someone can get 4 percent in an election and get no representation but someone some party—like the ACT Party—could get one seat but say 2 percent and they would get proportionate representation which is plainly unfair.That provision has been recommended against by reviews of the MMP environment. It is widely hated by electors and in fact it brings democracy into disrepute and that is a bad thing because democracy is such an important thing but none the less the National Party persists in supporting that rule. We have a member’s bill to close that loophole and the bill has been drawn from the ballot. National has said it will not vote for it or advance it and the reason for that is that National does deals such as the deal it did with John Banks. It is strange though that National backed him. You would think that this was the party of fiscal rectitude—this was John Banks who on the record had tripled council debt when he was last mayor. So he is hardly a fiscal conservative—this was all about political advantage.So we then come to the “tea tapes”. I was there on the day; the media tipped me off. I was standing in the electorate. I went along to the cafe. The whole thing was a stunt—everyone knows that. There were about 40 journalists there with cameras clicking away. They had an interview with John Key and John Banks and John Key told people they should vote ACT and not for Paul Goldsmith in the local electorate. Then they had a staged cup of tea behind some glass with 40 cameras there. It was a publicity stunt—it was public. Ambrose the photographer left on the table a container that was a recording device that uploaded automatically from his camera. He did not know it was operating according to what he said and he got back to the office and he found that he had audio of the conversation between Banks and Key. Key then called in the police in order to use that against the media during an election. He used the power of the State against the media during an election caused a week of controversy which suited him because he was the centre of attention for a week and then at the end of it the police did not prosecute but John Key deemed the photographer to be guilty. That is what John Key said—he deemed him to be guilty despite the fact he always had two defences: one that it was inadvertent—if you believe what he says and I have no reason to doubt him—and two that it was a public event. There was no way a court was ever going to convict that journalist for what happened because it was a publicity stunt gone wrong.So here we have it. After that John Banks came in here and it is found out that he lied about his donations. I can say that—he lied about his donations. It is true and I can say that and that will forever be to his shame. He pretended that he could not remember a helicopter trip to Dotcom’s mansion. He pretended that he had not asked for the cheques to be split into two amounts so it was less obvious. He pretended that he did not know of the donations and none of those lies—because they were lies—were believed by the court. John Key knew this at the time because it was set out in the witness statements that were produced by the police but he refused to read them. He did not want to know because it did not suit his political imperative which was to keep John Banks’ vote in this House.Hon Trevor Mallard: So he wouldn’t know he was a liar.Hon DAVID PARKER: That is right. He refused to look at the facts that showed John Banks to be a liar. We have seen other instances of that with Peter Dunne and the Government Communications Security Bureau fiasco. We have seen other acts of unprincipled behaviour by John Key and the National Party.This is yet another reminder as to why MMP needs to be changed to remove the single-seat lifeboat. The Rt Hon Winston Peters agrees with this. The Green Party agrees with this. The Rt Hon Winston Peters even though it is not in his interests to have a 5 percent threshold says we should keep the threshold at 5 percent and not have the single-seat lifeboat for the likes of John Banks. Mr Peters is a man of principle. So is the Green Party and so are we. We could all seek electoral advantage from this but none of the other parties does. The Rt Hon Winston Peters recognises that the threshold is appropriate to keep out the loony parties essentially which have very little support but could distort Parliament which is exactly what John Banks has done for the last 3 years and it is a shameful stain upon our Parliament that the police did not prosecute.The police did not prosecute. They were happy to deem Ambrose guilty but they would not prosecute John Banks. They did not prosecute John Banks. The police were politicised by—Hon Christopher Finlayson: That’s a disgraceful allegation.Hon DAVID PARKER: Well it is absolutely disgraceful that the Prime Minister used the police against the media during an election and then deemed Ambrose guilty when he would never have been convicted. This is a stain upon this House. We ought to be criticising John Banks. We ought to be criticising the things that led to this not being brought to a head many years earlier. Effectively the Government has got away with it. The Government has got away with it. For 3 years it was able to close its eyes to what was an obvious rorting of the system. It is just that John Banks was convicted albeit it is sad.