General Debate

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Minister for Economic Development) Link to this

I move, That the House take note of miscellaneous business. Tomorrow marks the 1-year anniversary of the new National-led Government, and the first year of the premiership of John Key. It has been a very interesting year.

To take people back a little bit, I point out that when the new Government came in, it inherited an economy that was in very, very bad shape. New Zealand had been in recession for almost a year at that stage, and the fundamentals of the economy were in extremely bad shape. To put that comment into context, the tradable sector in the New Zealand economy had been in recession for 5 years—it had shrunk by some 10 percent over that period of time—but the non-tradable sector, which is the bit that does not bring income into the country, had grown by some 15 percent.

In short, under the brilliant economic leadership of the previous Labour Government, the part of the economy that brings in income had shrunk, and the part of the economy that demands income had grown. That is why we face very large deficits for a few years ahead, and why we have had to make some difficult choices. Those choices, by and large, have been made with the best interests of the New Zealand people in mind. I think that the way in which the public have responded to this Government indicates that they understand that.

I will list a few things that the Government has done in the last short while. Firstly, there have been $1 billion worth of tax cuts to stimulate the economy. Front-line services have been boosted in health, education, and policing. Superannuation payments have also been maintained. The 2009 Budget attempted to put a curb on the growing national debt. Savings have been protected through the Crown Wholesale Funding Guarantee Facility and Crown Retail Deposit Guarantee Scheme. The Job Summit generated an environment where people could talk about the way in which we work together to save jobs in the economy. We have assisted 3,500 workers through the Job Support Scheme and the 9-day working fortnight proposal. We have created 17,000 Youth Opportunities jobs, which will provide those opportunities over the next 2 years. We have supported 5,500 people through the Restart package after they were made redundant. We have made 180,000 homes warmer and drier through our insulation programme.

We have capped the number and size of the core bureaucracy, and we have put $7.5 billion into infrastructure and $500 million into a general relief package to make life simpler and easier for small businesses. The Resource Management Act has been simplified. Major reviews are about to conclude to improve taxation and the health system, to get a better deal out of the electricity system, and to improve building regulations, overseas investment, and, next week, the emissions trading scheme. A further $190 million has been invested over 4 years in the Primary Growth Partnership.

All of that leads to a package of measures that shows leadership for the New Zealand economy at a time when things are tough. That is where the difference comes between this Government and the Opposition. Labour members have no economic credibility whatever. What we saw today in question time demonstrates just how bad it is. Rather than those members asking serious questions about how this country grows the economy, how we protect jobs, how we lift incomes for New Zealanders, and how we give our young people a brighter future, we had David Cunliffe, the Opposition spokesman on finance, asking why he never got on TVNZ 7. That is the biggest issue on his desk at the present time: trying to work out why he was not the one who was picked to do the promotion.

I think that highlights the second problem Labour members have, which is that they have no leadership whatsoever—no leadership whatsoever. Day after day they wheel poor old Phil Goff into the House, with his shaking hands as he trembles his way through his questions, reading them off the bits of paper that Annette King has just handed him. He gets pummelled by the Prime Minister and by anybody else whom he dares to put a question to. In the public perception, he is simply not making cutting points, which I think is causing a degree of confusion in the minds of many, many New Zealanders.

Hon ANNETTE KING (Deputy Leader—Labour) Link to this

What are the real issues, the daily issues that New Zealanders wake up to every morning and worry about when they go to sleep each night? What are the things that impact on the family at “No. 1 Struggle Street”, New Zealand? What are the aspirations and the dreams that Kiwis have for themselves, for their families, for their communities, and for their country? These are the real questions that need answers from the Key-led Government. These are the issues this Government should be devoting its time to. But what are we getting from this new Government? We are getting sideshows and show ponies, and we have a shambles. We have a shambles from that Government opposite.

I cannot remember a time when a Government fell apart so fast. One year and the wheels are falling off this Government. Its members might laugh and think that it is Opposition members who think that. I tell Government members to read the newspapers, listen to the television, read the blogs, hear the talkback radio, and hear the political commentators. A common theme is coming through. People are saying that this Government has no plans, its approach is short term, its approach is expedient, and it is chaotic. It is held together by the charm of a very nice man with a lovely smile. As Bill English said, John Key bounces from cloud to cloud; as Rodney Hide said, in a rare moment of honesty, he does not do any work either. Increasingly, there is a call for this Government to make some decisions, to take some action, to give some leadership, and to straighten out the shambles that we see in this House day after day.

If one is looking for the most shambolic of the Government’s Ministers, one has to say that it is the Minister for ACC, the Minister for the Environment, and the Minister who is responsible for the emissions trading scheme: one Nick Smith. He is afflicted by the opposite of the Midas touch. In his hands, everything turns to custard, to chaos, and to shambles. There were 6,000 motorcyclists out on the front lawn of Parliament yesterday, protesting against the Minister’s rise in levies. What did they call it? Animal manure, they said. That is what is wrong with his levies. He has created a crisis in order to scare New Zealanders into accepting his Government’s long-term desire to privatise the accident compensation scheme, and no one believes a word he is saying. All his huffing and his puffing and his peering down the lens of the television camera are being laughed at by New Zealanders, because Kiwis are not mugs. Kiwis know that the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) took $1 billion more in income than it spent last year, and it has the largest reserves it has ever had—$11 billion in reserves. Kiwis know that the levy this Government is putting on motorcyclists is unfair.

Of course, the Minister for the Environment always has a problem with figures. He is always getting his figures wrong. It is not just with regard to accident compensation. What about the whole emissions trading scheme? It has just been shot to pieces by the latest figures from Treasury. There is a $50 billion mistake. It is unbelievable—$50 billion. Broken down, that is $92,000 for every man, woman, and child in New Zealand. They will pay that for Nick Smith’s folly. That is what it will cost. The cobbling together of a flimsy coalition will force through a disastrous cost on ordinary, hard-working Kiwis so that Nick Smith can go to Copenhagen and strut on the international stage. It is such a shambles that his own leader, the Prime Minister, refuses to go to Copenhagen, because, he has said, nothing will happen there anyway. Nothing will happen, so what is the rush? I ask why Nick Smith is prepared to put at risk the economic future of all New Zealanders in order to go to a conference that will not achieve anything. In my view, Nick Smith and John Key are prepared to reopen for purely political purposes wounds that have been healed by comprehensive settlements in this country.

Hon PHIL HEATLEY (Minister of Fisheries) Link to this

I thank Labour members for applauding me before I start my speech. It is a wonderful pleasure to have that ovation. After 1 year in Government, National is working hard to deliver on its election promises and to deliver a brighter future for New Zealanders. We are seeing some of the signs of that recovery, thank goodness! No longer is the economy looking like the Labour Party polling record: it is no longer diving in the way that Labour support is. We have put in a rolling maul of initiatives to protect families from the sharpest edges of the recession, and it is working well.

I will take members behind the thinking of the way that we are dealing with the recession, and I will comment particularly on the fact that we are pumping capital expenditure into the economy by investing in infrastructure. That is investment in roads, investment in housing, investment in schools, and investment in broadband. What John Key did—and members might be interested in his approach—was to suggest to Ministers around the table that we should stimulate the economy by investing in the infrastructure that is creaking in this country and in infrastructure that needs investment, like roads and broadband.

Mr Key said that we should dust off all the reports that the previous Labour Government had on the shelf, and all the previous announcements on new roads, broadband, and new schools that the Labour Government had announced once, twice, or three times. Those reports relate to all the times that the Labour Government brought out a review about roading and said that it would form a committee or an action group, that it would have a meeting on it, and that it would have an independent review on it. Mr Key said that we would dust off all those reports and go down and actually build the roads. He said that we should get some money out and invest in houses, do up the schools that require investment, and invest in broadband. In other words, he said that we should get some cash and actually do all the great projects that the previous Labour Government talked about. Mr Key told Ministers to take off the shelf all those projects collecting dust, sort through them, decide which were the ones that we could do quickly, and then invest in them. What did he do? He invested half a billion dollars over 18 months to get the roads built. It has been an absolute delight, I can tell members, to see more roads being built and more schools being invested in.

But I can also tell members about one point of shame. We have seen New Zealanders take up the insulation scheme across this country—180,000 houses across New Zealand will be insulated, top and bottom, over the next 4 years. People will no longer be living in cold and squalid conditions, knowing that Labour would do nothing about that. Labour did nothing about that in regard to State housing and it did nothing about that in regard to private housing. It has been a delight to be involved in that process.

That raises the other point of shame, which is the way that the previous Labour Government, for 9 years, refused to fund Herceptin. While claiming that it supported women, it refused to fund Herceptin. John Key was in Government for 10 minutes, and we saw Herceptin funded for the early stages of breast cancer. National is rescuing those women, but, for a decade, the previous Labour Government said that the bureaucrats would not let it fund Herceptin.

Members of the previous Labour Government said the bureaucrats would not let them help women with early-stage breast cancer. They said they refused to do that because bureaucrats said they should not fund Herceptin, yet John Key was in Government for 10 minutes and he funded Herceptin. I can tell members that on this side of the House that is the sort of thing we are proud of achieving in this first year. It is interesting to know that the Labour Party is calling meetings up and down the country to get support. We have heard that it is hiring Portaloos, but no one is turning up.

Hon DAVID PARKER (Labour) Link to this

I rise to speak in the general debate. According to the National Party, this is just about a happy anniversary of 1 year in Government. The speech that we just heard from the Hon Phil Heatley had no substance. It was Crosby/Textor slogans. What did he say? He said “rolling maul” and “avoiding the sharp edges of recession”, and he gave no policy of substance. He did not defend the Government’s programme on amendments to the emissions trading scheme, and he did not speak to the controversies around the accident compensation system, because he has no answers to the criticisms that are being made.

We have heard in this House this year exaggeration after exaggeration from Dr Nick Smith. He came to this House and told everyone, initially, that the accident compensation scheme was insolvent, using a new measure of insolvency, under which the scheme would have been insolvent since the first day it was formed. He has scaremongered up and down the country. He had the newspapers reporting that everyone’s car registration fees would go up $133 per annum; then he said they would go up by $30. Now, $30 is bad enough, but we have to ask ourselves why the Minister exaggerated more than fourfold. It was because he was trying to present the scheme as fundamentally broken when people know it is not. He is trying to do that because it is the only way he can justify privatisation and moving away from the no-fault liability principles that lie under the scheme. He has been seen through.

Yesterday 6,000 bikers came to Parliament. They turned up and heard Dr Nick Smith. They gave him a hearing, and at the end of it, they were unimpressed by his flimflam. They said, as my deputy leader has said, “Belgian Blue manure, Belgian Blue manure”—I use a euphemism for the Speaker’s benefit. So the bikers have not been taken in. He had hoped that by proposing such outrageously unfair levy increases for bikers they would say the scheme is so stuffed that they want it privatised. But they did not fall for the bait. They turned up and took a principled approach. They said that, no, it was not fundamentally broken and, no, its principles were right.

CHRIS TREMAIN (National—Napier) Link to this

Tomorrow will mark the first anniversary of the National-led Government, and I take this opportunity to say a very big thank you to the people of New Zealand for giving us the opportunity to be the Government. I say, through you, Mr Speaker, that it is an absolute privilege to be the Government of this country, a privilege that we do not take lightly. Day after day, month after month we are focusing on the issues that matter to New Zealanders. That is the key point I want to make. I also thank the people of Hawke’s Bay for giving me the opportunity to be their MP, and I take that as a real privilege as well.

At the start of the term of our Government, I started one of my speeches with a whakataukī called “Whakataka Te Hau.” At the end of that whakataukī, the proverb says: “E hī ake ana te atākura. He tio, he huka, he hauhunga.” I want to remind people what that means. The last piece of that proverb says: “Let the red-tipped dawn come with a sharpened air, a promise of a glorious new day.” The point I was making was that this country at that time wanted change. It wanted to see a new vision for this country, a new way of doing things, and a way forward.

One year on, despite the rhetoric of the Opposition, the New Zealand public are seeing that change across the country. They are seeing a new dawn for this country, and they are excited about what is happening. The focus of this Government is on the matters that count for New Zealanders, not on the issues that we heard the Opposition talk about today, such as the size of someone’s underwear, the size of his pants, or whether he should be a star in an advertisement. The public are concerned about the issues that matter to them: how we will get people into jobs, and how we will raise wages. Those are the key points that they are concerned about.

I am pleased to say that commentators across the country—even some of our staunchest critics—are now saying that, yes, the Government is getting on with the job, and it is doing what it said it would do.

CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) Link to this

That was a very, very interesting contribution from the member for Napier, Chris Tremain. He was crowing about the National Government’s record in office after 1 year. He should be ashamed of himself. Hawke’s Bay has the highest regional unemployment of any region in the country at the moment. What is that member doing, apart from “helping around the margins” with the rest of his colleagues, to make a difference to those unemployed people in Hawke’s Bay? What about the fact that over 60,000 young people are on the dole queues at the moment? About 25 percent of the unemployed are young people.

ALLAN PEACHEY (National—Tāmaki) Link to this

Twelve months ago tomorrow, the dark, deep gloom of socialism was lifted from New Zealand, and life extended into 12 months of optimism, of positivity, and of growth. The reality is that New Zealand has entered a new era in its history, an era in which New Zealanders understand that good, moderate, sensible government can make a difference to their lives.

Out on the streets of Tāmaki, the electorate that I have the privilege to represent in this House, the message is clear: “Thanks heavens for the change of Government! Now we can look forward to controlling more of our own incomes.” There has been $1 billion in tax cuts, which have affected 1.5 million New Zealanders and their families. The importance of that is an acknowledgment by the National Government that people who earn the money know better how to spend it than a bunch of socialists, who from time to time somehow find themselves in Government. The people in my electorate of Tāmaki really appreciate that. They look forward to having more to come, as this Government works steadily and honestly to get the economy under control. That is very, very apparent out on the streets of the Tāmaki electorate and in working-class suburbs like Glen Innes.

Glen Innes is a suburb where 58 percent of the housing is still owned by the Housing New Zealand Corporation. There are people who, generation after generation as National Governments have allowed them, have purchased their State houses and become private home owners. The people of Tāmaki are delighted, and grateful to this Government that once again they will have the opportunity to purchase the State houses they live in and are raising their families in. On this side of the House, the National Government believes in private home ownership. Why the socialists will not let them buy their own homes is beyond the understanding of the good people of the suburb of Glen Innes, whom I represent.

These are people who welcome the moves on law and order made by the current Government. For 9 long years they have had to sit back, unsafe in their homes, and watch the organised gangs control their streets, watch the P houses trading up the street. Those are the houses that their children have to walk past every day to get to school. Now at long last a Government has stood up and said to the gangs that this will stop. There will be no more.

These people have aspirations for their children that were not being met under the previous Labour Government. They have aspirations that their children should go to good schools, and with this Government we are seeing interventions in schools, including schools in my electorate, that have been failing children. For 9 years the Labour Government preferred to make excuses, and to make decisions in the interests of people in the education sector who were not the parents and who were not the children. The people in my electorate are now delighted—

KEITH LOCKE (Green) Link to this

A week ago, on behalf of the Green Party, I sent the Minister of Immigration, Jonathan Coleman, an email suggesting that New Zealand should help Australia to solve its boat people crisis. That crisis came to a head because of 78 Sri Lankan Tamil refugees on an Australian customs ship, the Oceanic Viking, off the Indonesian island of Bintan, who wanted to go to Australia. There was another group of Tamils on an Indonesian naval ship off Java.

I proposed a repeat of what we did back in 2001, when we helped Australia by taking 131 Afghans who had been picked up out of the sea off Australia by the Norwegian boat the Tampa. New Zealand won plaudits for that humanitarian action. Over the years fair-minded Australians have said that it showed that our Government was more caring than theirs. Their previous Prime Minister, John Howard, used the Tampa incident to whip up anti-refugee sentiment and win the 2001 election. Most New Zealanders are now proud of what we did in 2001, and proud of how well some of those Afghan refugees, known as the Tampa boys, have done academically and in sport.

Unfortunately, Dr Coleman turned down my request to now take in some of the Tamil asylum seekers, but he did say that the Governments of both Australia and New Zealand would “continue to keep closely in touch on the issues involved.” This leaves the door open for New Zealand to share the load with Australia, in the spirit of ANZAC cooperation, and be part of the solution. And why not? New Zealand is so far across the Tasman Sea that asylum seekers in their rickety boats never make it to our shores. We also now get very few people claiming asylum at our airports. The total number of such people for the whole of 2008-2009 was only 23, a tenth of what it was in the early 2000s.

The Green Party just wants us to help. We do not particularly care whether these Tamil asylum seekers come in under the annual 750-person refugee quota, as the Tampa refugees did, or are additional to that quota. There is certainly an argument for concentrating on Sri Lankan refugees at this time. The plight of the Tamil population in northern Sri Lanka is a dire one. In the aftermath of the civil war, hundreds of thousands of Tamils are in detention camps in miserable conditions, and they are not allowed to go home. A sense of hopelessness has set in among the Tamil population, as their human rights are violated on a massive scale and they are told by the Sri Lankan Government to give up their dream for an autonomous Tamil administration in the north of the country.

New Zealand can help to address this source of the refugee problem at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting later this month. Our Prime Minister should raise this issue as one requiring the urgent attention of the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group, or CMAG as it is called, which is tasked with upholding human rights in Commonwealth countries. The Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group has been very engaged with Fiji. It would be inconsistent, to say the least, for the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group not also to engage with the Sri Lankan crisis. The Rajapaksa Government in Sri Lanka needs to get the message that there will be serious consequences if it continues to violate the democratic principles of the Commonwealth, as outlined in the Harare Commonwealth Declaration.

When Dr Coleman announced that New Zealand would not take some of the Tamil asylum seekers from the Oceanic Viking, he said he did not want to reward queue-jumpers. The reality is that Tamils fleeing Sri Lanka today commonly cannot find a queue to sit in. They are not safe in Indonesia, which has not signed the 1951 refugee convention, and which is now talking about deporting some of the Tamils back to Sri Lanka. Mr Coleman can do three things now to help these desperate people on the boats: firstly, he can ask Indonesia not to return Tamils to possible persecution in Sri Lanka; secondly, he can ask Indonesia to allow the officials of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees access to all the people on the boats to determine who are genuine refugees; and, thirdly, he can indicate to Australia and Indonesia that New Zealand is open to taking a significant number of these United Nations High Commission for Refugees - endorsed refugees.

TODD McCLAY (National—Rotorua) Link to this

Twelve months ago tomorrow New Zealanders woke to a breath of fresh air in this country. They woke up and the sun was shining. It was like the lifting of the Iron Curtain or the first brick that was pulled out from the Berlin Wall. It was an end to being lectured, an end to being looked down on, an end to the repression, and an end to a Government that had had enough of New Zealanders and had put its own issues and interests first. Thank goodness for that!

In its place, New Zealanders got John Key, a new National Government, and a breath of fresh air. They got fresh ideas, integrity, determination, and absolute commitment. These are things that New Zealand had forgotten about. They are things New Zealanders had not witnessed for the last 9 years—9 lonely years of Government for Labour. Thank goodness Labour is now on the opposite side of this House, in Opposition.

I mentioned repression and being lectured, but the last 12 months have seen action, delivering on promises, listening to New Zealanders, and delivering for New Zealanders. What a lot of work we have seen in the last 12 months! There has been $1 billion of tax cuts for 1.5 million New Zealanders. What did Labour say? Labour said that it was not good enough. Labour said we should not be doing it; then it said we should be spending more. Labour said we were delivering tax cuts for the richest New Zealanders.

Members will remember that we are in the deepest recession in 60 years. It started in New Zealand before any other country in the world. The previous Government saw in the recession for us a year before the Government was changed.

There is extra funding for the front line. We have seen additional funding for health and education. We had better remind Labour members that they did not and still do not know that the front line means doctors, nurses, and teachers delivering for everyday New Zealanders and Kiwi battlers. Funding for the front line is about making sure that doctors and nurses are there in the hospitals doing what is needed to help New Zealanders in their time of need, and it is about educators and teachers helping young children to read and write.

The Opposition tells us that that is not important—that young kids in New Zealand do not need to know how to read and write, and that everything was all right under the regime the Labour Government put in place. But the parents in the streets in our electorates are telling us that that is important to them.

What else has the new Government done? There is $7.5 billion of infrastructure spending over the next 5 years. That means more roads, more houses, and more schools. It means broadband in urban and rural areas. I tell members that people in the rural areas of my electorate, Rotorua, such as the farmers, cannot wait for us to deliver on that commitment to better broadband. That $7.5 billion of infrastructure spending means that New Zealand will be more competitive, more productive, and have a much better economy.

That is what the National Government has done in the past year. Somebody came up to me in the street in Rotorua over the weekend and he said: “We may not agree with everything your Government is doing, but at least you’re delivering on your promises and you’re doing exactly what you told us you would do.” He said he would find it hard to support a tired, old party that had run out of ideas, keeps recycling some of them, and has lots of excuses but no new direction for New Zealand. He was talking about Labour. I cannot wait to get out on the campaign trail in 2 years’ time and campaign on our record, and on the future—not about the past and all the things they have been hiding.

One of the most important things we have done relates to law and order. During the campaign last year people told me that law and order was the biggest issue. Criminals are soft on crime and the Labour Government was soft on crime. I heard a story today. I heard that Phil Goff, during the last election campaign, was in prisons asking for votes. He was asking prisoners for votes.

I find it hard to believe, firstly, that Phil Goff would stoop to such low levels and, secondly, that there are criminals out there who would believe the hype that Labour put out. Do members know what prisoners were telling Phil Goff? They said that they quite liked John Key and that he seemed to know what he was doing. They said that he wanted to put in place laws that would help people keep out of trouble when they are young, and help them get back on the right path so that they would not fill up the prisons.

But Labour members were soft on law and order, and let me tell members where they were soft and why they were soft. We have delivered new powers to the police. Labour members said they did not like that and did not want it. I think they voted for it—but they said they did not like it and did not want it.

Tougher penalties for organised crime and criminals is a good measure. Labour members did not like that measure and did not want to introduce it when they were in Government—but let us see what happened. Labour members voted for it. They tried to say it was their idea, but they had 9 years to deliver on their ideas and what did we see? They were chucked out, and then they voted for our bill. “Well done!”, I say to Labour members. They are finally listening to New Zealanders and listening to the Government. We are also looking at tougher sentences for crime—another tough law and order message.

DAVID GARRETT (ACT) Link to this

Recently Mr Hone Harawira wrote an email spelling out how he feels about white people. The email’s contents are well known, far and wide. But I want to talk not about Mr Harawira but about the role of the Race Relations Commissioner, both in regard to that recent incident and in general.

Mr Joris de Bres is quite sure about his role; he says his hands are tied. He says Mr Harawira is entitled to the fundamental right of freedom of speech, and he was exercising that. I am inclined to agree with the commissioner on that point. However, this raises the question of why we have a Race Relations Commissioner in the first place. Perhaps it is to intervene when someone says something that de Bres does not like, because his belief in freedom of speech seems to be very selective.

When Paul Holmes made a comment about a “cheeky darkie” a few years ago, the commissioner was very quick to get involved. Holmes’ supposed freedom of speech on that occasion was less important than what he said. Holmes was forced to write a letter of apology to Kofi Annan—the target of his comment—among other touchy-feely “bridge-building” exercises. Holmes’ original public apology was deemed insincere by Mr de Bres, so he was forced to make a better one. Members of the public will have made their own judgement regarding Mr Harawira’s apology, and Mr de Bres’ claims that he cannot get involved.

Perhaps we can find the explanation for this double standard in 2002. That was the year the commissioner gave a speech that described European colonisation of New Zealand as “a sorry litany of cultural vandalism”. He then went on to compare colonisation in New Zealand with the Taliban’s destruction of 3rd century Buddhist statues in Afghanistan. Did he apologise for any of that? Oh, no! He refused to say sorry despite a massive public uproar.

And he is not the only one. Such questionable behaviour has been seen before in his office. Mr Wally Hirsch, an earlier Race Relations Conciliator, as he then was, was asked to act after activist Hana te Hēmara told young Māori to “kill a white and become a hero”. Mr Hirsch’s reaction was to demand an apology from a Sundaynewspaperfor repeating those comments. All those characters are entitled, like the rest of us, to freedom of speech. The problem many people have is that taxpayers have been paying for people like Hirsch and de Bres to espouse these double standards for more than 20 years. So I return to my original question of why we need a Race Relations Commissioner.

Race-based discrimination is already illegal; there are already mechanisms in place to deal with it. The most important mechanism, though, which is more powerful than any court of law or tribunal, is the court of public opinion. The old saying that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” springs to mind. The public can recognise stupidity, ignorance, and prejudice, and judge people accordingly. People will judge those of us here on the quality of the ideas we bring, and the values we espouse and practise. When Holmes made his comments, he lost a lot of public support. Mitsubishi withdrew its sponsorship from his TV show, and he was tried by the public and found wanting. As an elected member of this House, Mr Harawira will have to face the judgment of the electorate sooner or later, as we all do, in one way or another.

But what about our Race Relations Commissioner? He is not elected by the people; his is a political appointment. He may have suffered a backlash for his Taliban comments, but he is still there, at the taxpayers’ expense, blundering his way around, exercising double standards, and determining when free speech can be practised without penalty and when it cannot. It is absurd to pay someone to proclaim that racism is wrong. We all—at least, most of us—know this already, and have for a long time. Absurdity is one thing, but sinister motives are altogether another. The evidence seems to be that not just this guy but race relations commissioners in general come with their own agendas. Harawira and de Bres, like the rest of us, are perfectly entitled to hold and express their views—

MOANA MACKEY (Labour) Link to this

It has been a very telling general debate. We have had National member after National member getting up to brag about how great their first year in Government has been. We were treated once again to the always enjoyable court jester routine by the Minister of Housing, Phil Heatley, but not once did he mention why, in an entire year of being Minister, he has not done a single thing on affordable housing—apart from tell his department not to promote any of the programmes Labour put in place—so that he can hand money back to the Government to pay for its shambolic $110 billion emissions trading scheme blunder—

PESETA SAM LOTU-IIGA (National—Maungakiekie) Link to this

It is a real privilege and an honour to make the last speech in this general debate. Many on our side of the Chamber have already alluded to the fact that it has been almost a year since our National Party became the Government. It is a real privilege, because last November the people of New Zealand said: “We trust you.” We are hugely honoured to have been given that privilege to govern this country. The reason people said that they trusted us was that we have a leader in the Hon John Key who relates to the people of New Zealand. We have a party, a set of members of Parliament, and a party structure that listens to New Zealanders when we go out into our electorates.

One of the first promises we made, and followed through on, before Christmas 2008, was a tax cut package that gave back to New Zealanders some of the money they had earned, because we trust New Zealanders to spend their own money. The message from suburbs like Ellerslie and Onehunga is that people want to be trusted with their own money. There are hard-working New Zealanders out there who want to see the Government focus on Government services.

As a Government we continued on with the retail banking guarantee—