Brownlee Gerry: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Brownlee Gerry: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:637;Page:7269] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (National—Ilam) 
: 
 That was a “come follow me” speech made by the angry young man in the Labour Party Phil Goff. He has worked out that the rudder has dropped off Helen Clark’s ship. He knows that she and Michael Cullen are at loggerheads and that it is all over for both of them. He is putting his hand up and saying: “Come follow me; I am the saviour!”. Well at least he talked about some things that Labour has done. It has not done them well—he did not talk about that—but he did talk about what it had done. Helen Clark did not talk about those things because no social indicator in this country is heading in the right direction. It does not matter how many times Helen Clark says things are good because the statistics show the truth. The Government is in severe trouble. 
In recent times Michael Cullen wanted to go out and tell all New Zealanders who pay an average mortgage that the Government would be sorting out its own problems by charging those people $80 a week for the privilege of holding that average mortgage. And he wants to say that our leader John Key was in favour of that idea! Let me tell members the true story. When John Key went up to Michael Cullen's office he thought he would be hearing some massive solution to one or two issues that exist in the economy and he was unbelievably excited that a finance Minister in a Labour Government could think the solution was to tax people $80 a week on average to sort out one of his Government’s problems. I tell Mr Cullen that the reason Mr Key was excited was that he simply could not believe his luck. We know that despite the Prime Minister’s denials that idea still lurks in the background and that that is what Labour would do if it got half a chance and thought it would get away with it. 
We should look closely at Labour’s record. We have heard some interesting comments this afternoon by Mr Peters the great upholder of the current Government. Mr Peters thinks it would be a good idea to fix New Zealand’s savings rate by impoverishing us as a nation through currency deflation. Members should work that out! With the strike of a pen he wants to lower our exchange rate—that is cut the value out of the New Zealand economy. Apparently that would help us save money! 
Hon Members 
: What? 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: Work it out! I could make similar comments about Mr Anderton but most people have worked out that he is not going anywhere and therefore he is not worth wasting any time on. 
Helen Clark did not talk about the social dislocation in our society. She did not talk about low education standards in our society. She did not talk about the appalling state of our health system. She did not comment on the fact that at present every second Maori male leaving school does so without a qualification of any sort. There was no concern shown about those issues. In her mind she somehow believes that everything she has done in the last 3 years has fixed all those problems. 
Why do I say that? About 3 years ago I asked her whether she had done a U-turn on her policies and whether she stuck by the comments she made in her Prime Minister’s statement that year whereby she said: “I have no second thoughts about the policy approach designed to pit white against brown and rich against poor in New Zealand. I will fight that to my last breath.” When I asked that question she responded: “I happen to have a vision for society where we go forward together and do not see policies based on privilege for the rich leaving a large marginalised brown underclass in their wake.” Apparently the underclass has disappeared in 3 short years! 
Let me tell Helen Clark that that is not the case and I certainly commend John Key for having the courage to say that something needs to be done about the parlous state of so many young children in this country. It is not only those 80000-odd children who currently go to school every day hungry who miss out on educational opportunity. We know that their performance in the classroom sadly affects far too many others at the same time. But according to Helen Clark that problem is all gone it is all fixed and now we just have to be a bit sustainable about where we are heading. 
I think there is a little bit of a joke in all of that as well. We have heard from the Prime Minister that the big centrepiece of her Government over the next short while will not be to get better health services or to deal with educational failure or to do anything about the extremely large number of working-age New Zealanders who are being transferred from the unemployment benefit and on to the sickness and invalids benefit. Now let me give a statistic there. The Prime Minister is saying that there is no problem and that more working-age New Zealanders are in work now than ever before. But our population over the last 7 years has increased by about 500000 so we might expect that. However the number of people going on to the invalids benefit or the sickness benefit last year increased by 3171 to a staggering 125500 New Zealanders. Yet the Government wants to say that everything is OK. The Prime Minister did not mention that fact today. 
The big centrepiece now is climate change. What are we going to do in that regard? We are going to have a biofuel target whereby 3.5 percent of our liquid fuels will be biofuels in about 5 or 6 years’ time. Let me tell the House that in 5 or 6 years’ time if that target is met then we would be contributing to a reduction of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions on today’s measure by about one five-thousandth. That target is the centrepiece of the Prime Minister’s statement. She told the House there would a whole lot more permanent forests planted and that NgatiPorou would plant 30000 hectares of trees. Let us look at that figure. If they were planted today—and let us be fair; it would take some months possibly years to plant that acreage—it would be 10 years before there was enough carbon sequestered in that forest to meet 1 year of our current deforestation. So 11000 hectares are cut down a year—a large percentage of which is owned by the Government—and the Prime Minister says the Government is going to fix things with this permanent forest planting. The Government has its head in the clouds. 
A great deal more could be done on this issue—and it has to be. The National Party heads into this year with a programme that John Key has outlined. The Labour Party hates that our programme focuses fairly and squarely on the failure of Helen Clark and her Ministers. What else would one expect? The reality is that Labour has well and truly lost its way. It does not have a programme that looks anything like what New Zealanders expect of a Government. We have heard the idea that it will apparently improve all of our circumstances by introducing a waste tax. But that will not do anything for a child who is sent to school hungry. We heard much earlier in Helen Clark’s speech that there are no slogans that will fix anything. I wish she had said the same thing at the end of her speech because there was little else in it. There was scant mention of economic transformation for example. That is because Labour has given up on that issue. There was barely a reference to law and order. 
Hon Phil Goff 
: Come on! There were pages of it. 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: There we have the soft Mr Goff who is the man holding up the Government actually allowing the police to have the authority to do something about the Graeme Burtons of this world. The Prime Minister rather than saying that Labour will give the police the authority to get these guys off the street has said the Government will enter into negotiations with the Public Service Association to see whether probation officers are prepared to work more closely with the police while we hold the hands of these violent criminals who at any moment might cut someone’s hands off so they can run off and stab shoot or do anything else violent. Mr Goff sits over there with a grin on his face knowing that he can stand up in his electorate and say that Labour has been tough on crime and not mean one damn part of it. It is very very sad. 
Members know of McGehen Close do they not? I heard the other day that when John Key went there—he went there in a car with his name on the side of it so that people would know who he was and they had seen him on TV—he got out of the car shook people’s hands and had a talk with them. Apparently Phil Goff had been there the day before. He pulled into McGehen Close wound down his car window tooted the horn until a few people came out then said that he was sorry he could not get out because it was raining. He showed no care whatsoever. That attitude typifies the Labour Government’s attitude toward New Zealanders who are suffering at the present time.