King Annette: Adjournment — Sittings of the HouseText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeKing Annette: Adjournment — Sittings of the House[Sitting date: 09 December 2015. Volume:710;Page:8725. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon ANNETTE KING (Deputy Leader—Labour): Well we all know it is nearly Christmas so Mr Speaker I want to bring you glad tidings of great joy and say how happy I have been to be able to assist you with your rulings throughout the year.Mr SPEAKER: I am extremely grateful.Hon ANNETTE KING: And I do wish you a very merry and restful Christmas. It does not matter how old you are you cannot help but get a little bit excited when Christmas comes round. I mean you are excited to see the family—even that grumpy old relative who never brings even a bottle of wine or a bar of chocolate. You get excited—Hon Chester Borrows: You were looking at me! That’s not fair.Hon ANNETTE KING: No not you Chester—Chester you are very generous. You get excited about the break you know being around the barbie with a cold beer or whatever your tipple is and having the cricket droning in the background. You get excited to leave this place. As much as we all love each other—and that includes Gerry—oh he is gone—I was going to make a special mention of Gerry.Mr SPEAKER: Order!Hon ANNETTE KING: Of course I would like to make a special mention of my cousins here today. We at some times all love each other although the public do not know that. We are excited to receive and to give gifts at Christmas are we not—even the ones that you get back from your relatives that you gave them last year? The giving and receiving of gifts is one of the greatest pleasures you can have in life and I have been wondering what New Zealanders think about the gifts that they have received from this Government over the last 7 years.The National Party has generously given quite a number of gifts. In fact Carmel Sepuloni worked out 12 gifts at Christmas that the National Party has given to us and as I was reading them out she could probably even put them to music. Of course the first gift from this Government is the Prime Minister ignoring detainees. Well he was far too busy with all those selfies that he has been taking and putting up on Twitter. The second gift from the National Party has been two toy sheep—two toy sheep and a $500 bill to fix them. High priority it was to have them at the Ministry for Business Innovation and Employment Christmas party and I have to wonder—and maybe Mr Speaker could help us with this—what on earth were they doing to the sheep? The third gift from the National Party is three $6000 sofas. Well we all thought that Jenny Shipley’s $3000 sofa—and there was only one of them—was over the top. I have to once again ask: why on earth do they need such upholstered sofas over there in the Ministry for Business Innovation and Employment?The fourth gift of Christmas from the National Party is the $45 million to fix Novopay. And the question we ask is: is it fixed? Well are there any outstanding debts that still need to be paid? Of course the fifth gift from the National Party is five flag options—five flag options it gave us for Christmas. The Prime Minister—I think his vanity project is just about to flutter away as the number of those in the referendum is nowhere near the number they had hoped for. The sixth gift of Christmas has to be unemployment at 6 percent and climbing. You see the National Party is ambitious for New Zealand but not if you want a job.The seventh gift of Christmas is 7 long years of this National Government as its Ministers become more and more weary and worn-out and out of touch and I have to say on a daily basis they look more like dried arrangements. Then we have the eighth gift of Christmas: $80 billion gross debt and 80 different excuses as to why we have got $80 billion of gross debt. Then the ninth gift of Christmas is nine bills through urgency. Oh was that not fun? Was that not fun especially for those who stayed and debated? I notice it was not a high priority for most of the Ministers to be here to debate the nine bills of Christmas.Then here is my personal favourite—my personal favourite. The 10th gift of Christmas of course is 10 pretend bridges for Northland—10 pretend bridges for Northland—promised by the pretend Minister of Transport but backed up by the pretender for the top job Steven Joyce. Then we have got the 11th gift—I am nearly there Mr Speaker—the $11 million apartment in New York. Let us be honest: nothing is too good for the workers. Then the 12th gift of Christmas has to be the $12 million Saudi farm fiasco. Those are the 12 gifts.I just want to wish everyone a merry Christmas thank our staff—particularly our electorate staff out there in our electorate offices—and say I hope everybody has a restful Christmas and comes back ready to fight again in the new year.