English Bill: General Debate 
English Bill: General Debate 
[Volume:648;Page:17557] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Leader—National) 
: 
 There is a fairly simple issue at the heart of the controversy over what is now almost 2½ weeks around the New Zealand First donations and it is this: New Zealand First and Labour have run a campaign for a long time on the need for transparency for large donations because large donations suggest political influence. What has become clear is that those parties cannot meet the standards that they have set for everybody else. 
The system is simple. If one runs the risk of taking a large donation—and there is no doubt that that has happened; $100000 and $25000 are large donations—then one ought to be able to explain what happened with the donation and why it did not influence one’s decisions. Helen Clark has decided having spent 2 years ramming the Electoral Finance Act through this House that the standard now is one of criminal behaviour. After ranting about transparency and big money for a decade Helen Clark now says a person can be a Minister in her Cabinet provided that that person is not guilty of criminal behaviour and the way she will find out whether someone is guilty of criminal behaviour is to ask the person concerned. That is the standard. That is ridiculous. That is absurd. 
And that issue will not go away until the questions are answered because that is what every other MP in this House would expect to have to do. If other MPs had received a donation of $100000 they would expect to have to answer the question particularly if the donor is a friend of the Government that they are part of. Any Prime Minister should expect any member of the House to answer the questions. But what have we seen instead from Helen Clark? Last week in this debate I talked about the prevarication and procrastination of the Prime Minister. One week and many thousands of words later we are no further ahead. The Labour-led Government is paralysed by this matter. 
Let us measure Labour by its own yardstick. What is happening to the emissions trading system legislation? That was the main plank of Labour’s sustainability theme laid out by the Prime Minister as being the key to the 2008 election and her Government’s programme. It is going nowhere. It is dead. The Government cannot get the votes in this Parliament to put that legislation through. What about the legislation regarding the financial sector where today the Guardian Trust has frozen a further quarter of a billion dollars of funds after a billion dollars were frozen by Hanover Finance just a couple of days ago. The legislation that was meant to apply to that has had to be rewritten from clause 3—after 18 months of the Government saying it would solve the problem. So we are paralysed on that. What about the confidence vote that my colleague Gerry Brownlee referred to? What matters more than maintaining the confidence of the Parliament in the executive while the confidence vote has been put off? 
Judith Collins 
: Why is that? 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: Well it must have something to do with the people who are meant to vote on confidence. It is an absolutely plausible explanation however offensive it might be to the Government that the deal between Labour and Winston Peters that has Helen Clark saying her new standard is one of criminality is about maintaining a confidence vote from New Zealand First till Thursday or next week—because if Helen Clark puts that to the vote and loses it the Government is gone. So what we do know is that the Government is paralysed by a matter of internal politics between itself and its coalition partner. 
The public are facing record high interest rates record financial collapses a collapse in house prices and a coming explosion in unemployment figures and Helen Clark has spent the last 2 weeks saying she has confidence in a Minister if he is still there. And then she says National is guilty of tautology! Today she said that if the Minister is still there then she must have confidence in him. The Prime Minister is parsing her grammar word by word to try to stay in Government while the public is suffering.