Hon Christopher Finlayson

CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON (National) : It is great to be back after a wonderful New Zealand summer in Wellington—a city that very soon will be strongly National. [Interruption] It is my hope that those honourable members who are not fortunate enough to live in this great city also had a good summer—and I refer to my friend from New Zealand First. It is also great to support my leader’s motion of no confidence in this grotty Government. Why? Because this Clark-led Government has consistently failed to make any significant improvement in the areas of real importance to New Zealanders. It lacks ambition; it is tired; it is bereft of ideas; it has lost touch with the people who put it there; and under its lead our country has become a story of lost opportunities. It is so apparent that as time has gone on, Labour has concentrated more and more on its own survival—witness its performance last year—and less and less on the issues that matter to the people of New Zealand.

Gerry Brownlee, with his customary accuracy, identified the questions that New Zealanders really want answers to. Harry Duynhoven should listen very carefully to this because the people of New Plymouth will be asking him this before they throw him out at the end of the year. Why is it, I say to Harry, that after 8 years of Labour we are paying the second-highest--

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): I am sorry to interrupt the member but this has happened quite frequently this afternoon. People are referring to members by their first names. Members must refer to a person by his or her full name or title.

CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: I ask the Hon Mr Duynhoven why, after 8 years of Labour, we are paying the second-highest interest rates in the developed world. Why is it that under Labour the gap between wages here and wages in Australia and other parts of the world keeps getting bigger and bigger? Those are major questions that will haunt Labour throughout 2008. Why is it that under Labour we will get a tax cut only in election year, when we really needed it years ago? Why cannot our hard-working children afford to buy their own house? Why is one in five Kiwi children leaving school with grossly inadequate literacy and numeracy skills? Why, when Labour aspires to be carbon neutral, do our greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at an alarming rate? Why has the health system not improved, when billions of extra dollars have been poured into it? Why is violent crime against innocent New Zealanders continuing to soar, and why is Labour unable to do anything about it? Let the member for New Plymouth answer those questions, if he can.

The answers to those questions are obvious: all these problems are not because of Ruth Richardson; the sun and the moon, as the Minister of Justice would say; or the National Government in the 1990s. It is because Labour is useless. National is going to focus on the real issues facing New Zealand, and we are not going to be fixated on the tired old debates of 20 or 30 years ago. We know that New Zealanders are demanding change, and are demanding change because it is time for a Government that says no to mediocrity and that expects more for New Zealand. We are going to lift wages by driving economic growth. We are going to invest in infrastructure and ongoing tax cuts. We are going to monitor the quantity and quality of Government spending, and, yes indeed, we are going to create safer communities, which do not exist in New Zealand at the moment—certainly not in places like Manurewa.

This Government is going to be held to account in 2008. Helen Clark has had 8 years in office, but in many areas things have gone backwards. Let me illustrate this by referring to a number of matters that the Prime Minister talked about this afternoon. The Prime Minister, for example, has emphasised the importance of the innovation economy to New Zealand’s economic prospects. An important component of the innovation economy is up-to-date intellectual property law, and presumably that is why she made the Hon Judith Tizard the Minister responsible for intellectual property reform—what could be called the ultimate oxymoron! That Minister has made such a hash of copyright law that she needed a ministerial minder in 2007. First it was Steve Maharey, who became so fed up with trying to direct her that he resigned from Cabinet altogether, is resigning from Parliament, and is seeking refuge in Massey University. I do not know who the minder is now. Rumour has it that it is Trevor Mallard. Well, whoever is working on copyright, it is clear that the Copyright (New Technologies and Performers’ Rights) Amendment Bill is going nowhere. It is languishing at No. 17 on today’s Order Paper and I do not believe that it is going to go anywhere this year, other than out the back door.

So much for intellectual property law; so much for the legal infrastructure needed for the innovation economy that the Prime Minister talks about. Indeed, the only intellectual property issue she mentioned this afternoon was the resale royalties for visual artists. Well, that is hardly a mainstream issue. The time has come for a comprehensive review of copyright law, which is fundamental to a knowledge-based economy; and Labour has no answers on this issue.

Then let us look at Treaty negotiations. The Prime Minister mentioned Treaty negotiations this afternoon, and her statements were as supercilious as they were in 2007. Let us look at the reality. Labour has had three Ministers in charge of Treaty negotiations. The first Minister should have been called the “Minister in charge of stopping Treaty negotiations”, because all she did was conduct audits, instigate reviews, and release principles. The one thing she never did was negotiate settlements.

Dr Wayne Mapp: Too hard.

CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: That was too hard for her. Then we had the member for Taupo—enough said! No parody could ever exceed the reality. Now we have the Deputy Prime Minister, but his tricks fool no one. What we have is a trend of proclaiming agreements in principle, rather than negotiating agreements themselves. Over the adjournment I have had a good look at some of these documents and they indicate that an increasing amount of material is left to the imagination. So we get commitments, and Mr Jones will be interested in this, like “the Crown will explore certain place name changes”, rather than identifying the place names to be changed. Cultural redress sites are being slated for transfer, subject to the usual offer-backs, like under the Public Works Act, with the caveat that if the sites prove to be unavailable to iwi, because the offer-back is accepted, for example, then the Crown is under no obligation to offer any other site. This is the case, even though the list in the agreement in principle will doubtless have been culled from much longer lists that were provided to iwi at the time of negotiation. The result, for example, is that NgātiApa may receive much less than they thought they had agreed to. The recently announced, and much-trumpeted, Wellington agreement contains no real historical account, yet manages to make acknowledgments on the basis of that historical account.

So what does all this mean? First, a lot more work will need to be done to complete deeds of settlement—a lot more than used to be done under National in the 1990s. The record of this Labour Government in this critical area of national reconciliation is to do nothing. It has done nothing more than engage in some kind of arid and academic exercise, like the Wilson years; look utterly bewildered and muck up everything one touches, like the Burton interregnum; or sign agreements in principle and then superciliously trumpet success, which is the Cullen postscript. Everything that Labour has touched in this area it has got wrong. It has created intra-iwi scraps in the central North Island; inter-iwi scraps in Auckland; and has bent over backwards to hide redress value; and now it is signing useless agreements in principle.

The Prime Minister does not like this kind of criticism. With her customary zealous regard for the truth, she said last week that she was “waiting for the National Party to vote for a single Treaty settlement negotiated by us”. Well, if she had looked at the facts, she would have seen that there have been nine settlement Acts passed since that Labour lot came to office, and we have voted for all but two. It does not matter whether the issue is education, infrastructure, health, intellectual property, or Treaty negotiations, this Government has no ideas. It is washed up, it is useless, it is incompetent, and in November 2008 it will be something else too—it will be finished. New Zealanders know that it is time for a change and that the National Party can, and will, deliver that change.