Mark Ron: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMark Ron: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 09 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:8782. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]RON MARK (Deputy Leader—NZ First): It is a privilege to be able to stand and rise and speak on behalf of New Zealand First in this debate in reply to the Prime Minister’s statement. I guess I would start by saying to you Mr Speaker welcome back to the House and to all other members likewise. I hope you enjoyed the summer break. I hope you took the opportunity to reconnect with communities. One of the things I noticed when I returned to Parliament after a 6-year semester is that people who spend too much time in this place do get disconnected from their communities. They may make wonderful speeches like the one we have just heard by the Hon Michael Woodhouse but the reality as to how connected they are pretty much comes home when one is attending a barbeque or a community event back in the community and people start telling you what is really on their mind and telling you as an MP what they think about the business of this House and the way in which it is being conducted.Before I get into those comments from folk on the street back home and around the country I do want to take the opportunity to say thank you to the police to the Fire Service and to the council staff and district health boards for what they have done in supporting the country during our summer holiday period. One tragic accident in Masterton that saw the loss of two young lives which is totally needless and pointless severely tested police officers emergency crews and ambulance staff on that evening. I think we will hear more about that as it goes on. The bottom line is that these are kids who have died—a couple of kids are in hospital—and the people who bore the brunt of that are the emergency services who had to attend on the day and of course the grieving families. So again congratulations to the police and thanks for their work and thanks to the Fire Service which attended countless calls throughout the country over that holiday period while we were enjoying our time off.Back to the business of the House and I am going to say right from the word go that New Zealand First is looking forward to this year. I am looking forward to seeing our members of Parliament like Tracey Martin asking some very pertinent questions like: “Who is Andrew West at Lincoln University why did Steven Joyce promote his appointment and why is Lincoln University currently undergoing such a serious set of investigations and is there a Serious Fraud Office investigation?”. Tracey Martin will probably also be asking questions like: “Why is the Minister of Education allowing the people of Rangiora who supported the Rangiora High School to be asset-stripped?” I guess it is probably something to do with propping up the flagging Government funding so that it can generate a mythical surplus somewhere along the line by ripping off the people of Rangiora who actually funded that school through a farm and through the earnings of that farm. But it seems to me that Tracey will be asking some serious questions.I am really looking forward to hearing Clayton Mitchell talking to the House about the wonderful attributes of the occupational safety and health legislation that went through the House because all we heard out there over the Christmas break from farmers and from small-business people was moaning whingeing and bitching about this Government and how out of touch it is and how it simply does not understand the consequences of what is now being visited upon them by WorkSafe. We went up to Waitangi along with Winston and New Zealand First got—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): The Rt Hon Winston Peters.RON MARK: Oh the Rt Hon Winston Peters and actually the finest leader of any political party known to—I think probably he will go down in history as the most astonishing and outstandingly successful political leader of all time in New Zealand without a doubt. I thank you for raising that Mr Assistant Speaker about the Rt Hon Winston Peters. So we went up there and what did we hear?The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! The member will resume his seat. I corrected the member gently but the member has had a couple of sessions in here and should know that he does not bring the Speaker into debate.RON MARK: Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. It is so interesting to hear small-business people and medium sized business people asking us New Zealand First MPs: “What the hell has happened to the National Party? What has happened to it? Has it become the party of the corporates? Has it become the party of the globalists?”. It certainly does not understand the consequences of the occupational safety and health legislation that it has visited upon us and of course the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement.Well Fletcher Tabuteau is our spokesperson on the TPP agreement and I am not even going to attempt to try to address some of the nonsense that we have heard in the House today. The one thing we do know is that Minister Woodhouse just said that the benefit gain was $2.7 billion and yet all of his leaders on the front bench have been telling everyone it is going to be $3.5 billion. So someone is right—Hon Michael Woodhouse: The leader’s definitely right.RON MARK: —someone is not right someone is accurate and as Mr Woodhouse is now saying the left hand in the National Party does not know what the right hand is doing but that is because the left hand and the right in the National Party are probably kept in the dark like him. He is too far back on the benches there to really know.I will certainly be asking questions about defence and I have got to say that will bring in Darroch Ball who will be asking about the Limited Service Volunteer scheme. After all the denials and after all the Official Information Act gaming that has been going on—you would actually think some of these Ministers have been on an Xbox the amount gaming skill they have and how they are able to manipulate the Official Information Act. National went into an election in 2008 telling the whole nation that it believed in boot camps that it believed in young people being put into military training and that this was going to be the saviour of our youth and yet what has it done?Darroch Ball: Cut it.RON MARK: It has cut it slashed it and burnt it and it is closing it down. Instead of having the three Limited Service Volunteer operations in New Zealand—three centres: Burnham Trentham and Auckland—we are now going to have just one in Auckland. And here is the irony—well no I will not tell you because Darroch Ball has been doing some homework and I will leave it entirely over to him. But there is more to come so watch out for Darroch Ball as he puts the questions once again.Mr Speaker I have got to say that I do on occasion get a little bit grumpy in the House and you have probably noticed that. When our first-term MPs are acting as front-bench spokespeople and taking on Ministers who refuse to answer questions and do not tell the whole truth the exact truth and nothing but the truth in their answers to questions you know I have to say that our first-term MPs in this House have more than delivered what they were expected to. These people are punching way above their weight. By comparison we have got a whole bunch of National Party first-term MPs who sit there stand up and read out an oral question a patsy question that has been written for them—they probably did not even know what it said until they walked into here—and then they have got the embarrassment of reading out the real patsy supplementary questions to go with it. There is none of that over on this side. There is hard questioning for the Ministers on the facts and on the details and there will be more of that throughout 2016.Let us talk about the one thing that the Prime Minister did not want to talk about: the Middle East. You know Iraq Afghanistan—hardly a mutter or a murmur about it. And what did we see over the summer break? Well we saw the Minister of Defence Gerry Brownlee telling everybody: “victory in Ramadi”. Within 2 days we found out it was not actually a victory in Ramadi. In fact they are still fighting in Ramadi right now as we speak. In fact it would appear when you look at the bluster the propaganda the bumf and the rubbish—which you would think had been written by Comical Ali who was the propaganda Minister for Saddam Hussein—that we had had a stunning victory and it was all over. Well the fact is that it is not. What we know over on this side of the House because we do have connections we do know the facts—Clayton Mitchell: We do our homework.RON MARK: We do our homework; that is right Mr Mitchell. Ten thousand police and Iraqi defence force personnel are up against a couple of hundred Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fighters. And they are still fighting there. They do not have control. They are dealing with an insurgent that knows how to fight despite the fact that it has no air cover and that the combined power of the world’s air forces have absolute unequivocal unchallenged air superiority. If we had seen the same sort of fortitude tenacity and leadership out of the Iraqi officers at Ramadi it would never have fallen.And whilst we are focused on a big victory in Ramadi and talking about an impending attack on Mosul—my connections tell me that planning has not even started at Mosul; they are still trying to figure out how they are going to finish Ramadi—what are we hearing in Helmand? What are we hearing in Afghanistan? I will read you a little line: “Security conditions in Helmand witnessed a considerable deterioration over the course of early November”—and this is an older report I am not going to give you the later one—“as an expanded Taliban assault on northern central districts occurred alongside defections and withdrawals of Afghan National Security Force personnel.” I will go right down to the paragraph that mentions attrition and desertion—and this is one of the things it says: “On investigation it was reported that only 70 of 520 Afghani national police assigned to Sangin remained at their posts in early November. The risk of further deterioration remains high.” And what do we now know? Despite everything we are suing for peace against the Taliban the very force we said we were going to destroy.