Brownlee Gerry: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Brownlee Gerry: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 21 March 2012. Volume:678;Page:1154. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery) 
: 
 I move  
That the House take note of miscellaneous business 
. Whoever would have thought that Esko Aho the great right-wing leader of Finland the great right-wing Prime Minister of Finland would become a Labour Party icon? Is it conceivable that the Labour Party leader trying to cut out a new bit of space for a demoralised beaten and shoddy-looking party would choose a right-wing party leader from a country on the other side of the world to be his role model and worse than that that he would decide that New Zealand should set itself the target of becoming like Finland? 
I think we need to understand a few things about Finland. Firstly New Zealand surpassed Finland in the OECD better life rankings in 2010. We are ahead there. We have more consistent growth rates than Finland. But Labour members do not know these facts about Finland. They know only a few. I could give them some more. New Zealand has lower unemployment than Finland. New Zealand has lower inflation than Finland. We have better food and agricultural production than Finland. We have less than half the homicide rate of Finland. We have much higher economic freedoms than Finland. We spend more on education than Finland does. We have more women in third-tier education than Finland does. But this is the country—Finland—that David Shearer wants us to become like. That is the great Labour vision. 
I for the life of me cannot believe that that is what the Labour Party wants. I do not believe it. There has got to be more to it than this and I think the answer lies in the advice that Mr Shearer got in putting that speech together. He is new. We all know he is new and that he just wants to please everybody and in particular he wants to please his deputy Mr Grant Robertson the great Labour apparatchik in political circles. Grant Robertson knew these things so he said: “I’m going to set him up. I’m going to set him up.” Yesterday when the Prime Minister unveiled some of this stuff in question time who sat over there next to Mr Shearer smiling? Oh and how wide was that smile? You could drive a truck through it. He is trying to stay straight-faced now but he cannot. He cannot stay straight-faced because he knows that this is part of his cunning plan. 
When the big event came and Phil Goff moved on—but has he moved on; we will come back to that in a minute—Grant Robertson was too new too raw to put his name forward and a little bit too timid I suspect. So we had the battle of the Davids. We saw David Parker disappear pretty early then David Cunliffe and David Shearer had a bit of a go and it must have been a real coin toss there. However David Shearer came through and who sidled up beside him to become the deputy? The most ambitious man in the Labour Party: Mr Robertson. I think you have got to hand it to him. In a machiavellian sort of situation he is fantastic. That is unbelievable is it not? You can actually get someone to go out there and make a speech saying: “I want New Zealand to be like Finland which has worse unemployment than us has less growth than us can hardly feed the people who live there has a terrible homicide rate hardly educates its people and has no respect for women.” That is what he wants for New Zealand. That is a master stroke—a master stroke—from Mr Robertson who wants to set up Finland as being an icon for New Zealand touted by poor old Mr Shearer. Sooner or later Mr Shearer may wake up. 
Then there is the issue of Phil Goff. How many times did we see Phil Goff on TV? Three four or five times a week? More than we saw of him as the Leader of the Opposition. Tell me he is not on a comeback trail. He is in the paper; he is here there and everywhere. It is unbelievable. If you measure the column centimetres—Phil Goff versus David Shearer and then throw in a bit of Grant Robertson—you will see that poor old Mr Shearer is in third place again. It is not tidy. Mr Robertson if I were you I would be moving out of that seat over to where Annette King is and giving Phil Goff a big shove sideways because it looks to me like he is on the comeback trail. 
One of the interesting things is that it appears that the rest of the Labour Party members who sit there now in stunned silence at this revelation have not quite worked out what is going on. Trevor Mallard always laughs and that is a sure sign he is thinking: “Oh I didn’t see that coming.” They have just worked out what Mr Robertson’s cunning plan is: to set up Mr Shearer as often as possible.