Cullen Michael: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Cullen Michael: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:615;Page:11016] 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Deputy Prime Minister) 
:  
It is clear to us that New Zealanders face a choice. We can go forward on a path of progress and cooperation or we can go back to the divisions and extremism of the past and the not too distant past at that. This Government stands squarely for progress and cooperation and we have the numbers and the achievements to demonstrate it. We have had an economy over the last 3 years growing faster than the OECD average. We have been catching up on the OECD for the first time in a very very long time. As a result we have the lowest unemployment that we have had for many many years—more New Zealanders in work and fewer New Zealanders out of work than we have seen since the mid-1980s. We have restored the pension after the savage cuts carried through by National and New Zealand First and we put in place a funding arrangement to secure the pension for the baby-boom generation. 
 In health we have restored partially elected health boards we have more doctors more operations more patient satisfaction and a health system that is respected. In education we have increased enormously the number of people in tertiary education. In industry training we have increased the funding for low-decile schools. We have improved standards across a whole range of areas of achievement and of course household income has risen in part because of that rising employment. 
Yes we face problems. We have problems with a rising dollar largely caused by the falling dollar in the United States. Why is it falling? It is falling because President Bush is following National Party policy of tax cuts and spending increases and therefore large deficits. We have the problems of the foreshore and seabed where extremists at both ends are trying to wind things up and make life difficult and as nature has demonstrated in the last couple of days from time to time we always face weather problems in this country. 
However this picture of progress and cooperation is anathema to Dr Brash and National. Dr Brash is now some kind of pseudo-intellectual Mr Bean wandering through the world of politics falling over everything in sight and determined to destroy. National’s new agenda is based around so-called race-based policies. The only race-based policy I have heard in recent times is one that states that rights that are held by Maori should be abolished because they are held by Maori; rights that are held by anybody else should not be abolished. That is a race-based policy. 
But when challenged to say which policy he is talking about Dr Brash can come up with no more than trivial examples and he is usually wrong. So-called tangi leave does not exist in the bill—an invention of his own limited mind. When he talked about customary title conferring veto power in the Government’s proposals he was wrong and was laughed at by the lawyers representing the Maori participants in the debate. 
When it comes to education he said things were all right there because there is choice. If there is choice it would cover anything in terms of so-called race-based policies. In fact it is about decile funding. It is funding for low-income areas and it is funding for people who need assistance to achieve better. What does Dr Brash want? Does he want a nation of illiterate and innumerate people—an underclass that is overwhelmingly brown by the mid-21st century? Is that the society he wants to create instead of the 1950s English society he seems to want to recreate? 
National in Government accepted decile funding. It carried it through. At times National even claims it invented it. He then talks about the fact that there are some scholarships only for Maori. There are a few—he set up some of them as Governor of the Reserve Bank. The great majority of funding that Maori get in terms of paying their fees comes from iwi trusts etc. which is exactly the same as European Pakeha families paying for their own kids. But of course he says that Maori families should not be able to pay for their kids at university and polytech but Pakeha families should. If that is not a race-based policy then I would like to see one. 
With all these sorts of strange things coming from Dr Brash we have to question his inability to marshal any real evidence. He accepts any strange story and tittle-tattle about Maori that is running around so what is actually underlying all of this? What is going on in that vast dome of Dr Brash’s cranium that he seems to think that he can pick up these ideas? What is going on in there is like St Paul’s Cathedral. It is a big empty space with only ethereal sounds coming through it and a lot of dead bodies buried underneath it. 
One of our jobs is to describe those dead bodies because we have started to see the lids coming off the coffins in the last day or two. We have started to see the politically dead rising from their graves. Yesterday morning we saw Alan Gibbs. That was the man who said that as long as everything in our health system was market-based we would save $500 million a year. Eight hundred million dollars a year of extra spending later after failed restructuring and a total collapse of public faith in the health system National started to pour money into it to try to fix it up. If Alan Gibbs represents the future National wants to promote then we on this side of this House are feeling very very happy. 
We know what the agenda is: Mr Gibbs and National stand for privilege; they stand for tax cuts for the rich and for lowering everybody else’s incomes. As I have said so many times—but keep repeating it so it is worth repeating yet again—National believes that somehow or other to have the rich work harder they have to earn more and to have the poor work harder they have to earn less because there are two sorts of people in this world—the rich and the rest. National is for the rich and we are for the rest. 
Labour supports needs not privilege and those needs are many in our society. Mr Franks is not one of them. He objects to tax-funded people criticising the National Party and ACT. He is tax-funded himself of course though I suspect that is only a small part of the income he receives as a member of Parliament. When it comes into position the new register of interest will be very interesting indeed. 
What is Dr Brash’s actual policy? He has already said it many times. He has given many speeches and these will come back to haunt him. He believes in cutting the pension. He said it was too generous and National did it last time it was in office—even in its dying days in Government. He believes in raising the age for the pension so as to push it up beyond the next election for him. He believes in taxing the owner-occupied home—one of the very few people in this country who does. He believes in slashing benefits. 
He believes in cutting the holidays of the workers who have the least power to protect themselves. He believes in reducing workers’ rights and he believes in making workplaces less safe because it does not matter if ordinary working people get killed at work. They do not contribute to the wealth of this country according to Dr Brash. Only people like him contribute to the wealth of this country so his workplace should be made very safe indeed. 
He has a lot of questions to answer and as the answers come out people who thinkit is nice to have a go at Maori will start to say: “But he will have a go at me as well. He will cut my pension. He will make me work 5 years longer. He will cut my workers’ rights. He will take away the funding from my school. He will take away the funding from my public health organisation and I will be a lot worse off as a consequence of that.” Dr Brash stands for a peculiar form of elitism and privilege. We stand for need and if he follows his policy he will be dog tucker at the next election.