Hon Christopher Finlayson

CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON (National) : I start my speech by praising the previous Labour speaker, George Hawkins, and I say to that honourable member “Hang in there!”. The ninth floor hates him and he hates the ninth floor, but we are on his side. He is genuine Labour, not an identikit apparatchik like so many on that side of the House.

Genuine George Hawkins aside, this House has been exposed to dreary speeches from the Labour members that were prepared by spin doctors. They contain such tiresome phrases as “every problem in this country can be traced back to National in the 1990s”, but not to Labour in the 1980s.

Chris Auchinvole: That’s right.

CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: “I’m waiting for just one policy.”—I ask Mr Auchinvole how often we have heard that phrase. It really means “We’re too embarrassed to admit all the policy we’ve stolen from National.” Then the New Zealand First member Ron Mark got in on the act and we heard: “Tell us what your policy is.” That, for Ron, is shorthand for: “I’m so illiterate that I can’t read policy announcements on the National Party website.”

But there is another spin line that is starting to do the rounds in Wellington.

Chris Auchinvole: What’s that one?

CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: I tell Mr Auchinvole that it concerns Treaty negotiations, and the stellar role of the Deputy Prime Minister as Minister in charge of Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations. The Government is now pushing the idea that settlements have gained momentum only because of the high-profile offices held by the Deputy Prime Minister. One has to admire the gall of this Government. When it runs out of opportunities to blame the 1990s for the woes of this country, when it runs out of excuses, it simply erases the past and starts over. So now Dr Cullen is being promoted as the great saviour of Treaty negotiations; the previous 8 years of failure under two incompetent Ministers are simply ignored.

Members of this House who play golf will understand the term “mulligan”.

Chris Auchinvole: What’s a mulligan?

CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: I am very disappointed that Mr Auchinvole asked that, because, as a Scot, he should know. In golf parlance it means a “do-over”; if one hits a bad shot, one takes a mulligan and tries again. Apparently, it is named after a chap called David Mulligan, who played golf in the 1920s. He let it rip off the tee one day, was unhappy with the result, re-teed, hit again, and took no penalty. Real sportsmen, like me, never take mulligans. Bill Clinton was, apparently, a chronic taker of mulligans, and it is rumoured that the Deputy Prime Minister is quite a liberal taker of mulligans, although I cannot prove it because people tell me he does not have any friends to play with at the Napier Golf Club and always plays by himself.

The Government’s approach to Treaty negotiations this year has been to take a mulligan. For 8 years it has been hitting bad shots or, in the case of the MP for Taupo, completely missing the ball. But that does not stop those members from, in their ninth year, re-teeing and ignoring the past bad mistakes. It is almost like what Pol Pot did in Cambodia in the 1970s. He simply abolished the past. That is what Dr Cullen is doing in Treaty negotiations. He has abolished the past 8 years and has started again. Therefore no mention is made of the first Labour Minister in charge of Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations. Her arid intellectual approach yielded nothing in this area except a barren wilderness and a loss of momentum. The second Labour Minister is also erased from history. It is as though Mark Burton’s bewildered and confused administration of the portfolio never happened. When thinking of him, I always recall the quote from Oscar Wilde: “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.”

Now we have only the present, in the form of Dr Cullen. The Government spin around Wellington is that because the Deputy Prime Minister is both the Minister of Finance and the Minister in charge of Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations, he can open the cheque book and spend. But that is what he did with Toll Holdings. Faced with a rent dispute he bought the whole house at four times its market value. There were no checks and balances.

Chris Auchinvole: He failed to negotiate.

CHRISTOPHER FINLAYSON: He does not know what negotiation is. The net result, I say to Mr Auchinvole, was disastrous. The railways were purchased for $1.47 billion, when they were valued at around $350 million to $400 million.

We have been told that when the Deputy Prime Minister wants to do something, it gets done. In the last few months a number of agreements and principles have been signed up. But when we look at these agreements, we see that far from their being evidence of significant progress, they illustrate just how slow Treaty negotiations have become under this Government. Let us look, for example, at the agreement in principle for Taranaki Whānui, which comes nearly 5 years after the release of the report on the Wellington district by the Waitangi Tribunal. The Government’s failure in this area is indicated by the multi-year appropriations for Vote Treaty Negotiations at page 320 of the Budget 2008 Estimates. The estimated actual appropriation for 2007-08 is $56 million, whereas the estimated actual appropriation for 2008-09 is—guess what—$60 million. This indicates to me that Michael Cullen’s ambition in this area is to achieve as much as the great Mark Burton achieved last year. Mark Burton’s success was so stellar, so intergalactically spectacular, that Helen Clark stripped him of all his Cabinet portfolios.

Just as with tax cuts for long-suffering New Zealanders, in Treaty settlements this Government is moving from being Dr No to being Dr Dolittle. The reality of the matter is that no Government can insolently take a mulligan or abolish the past, like Pol Pot tried to do and like Dr Cullen is trying to do this year. This Government has to take responsibility for its actions; a point made so admirably last night by that rising star of the Labour Party Clayton Cosgrove, the Minister of Immigration. He made a plea in his speech for the Government to be judged by its actions over the last 9 years. All I can say to that is “amen”. He is exactly right; I could not agree more. Notwithstanding the recent flurry of activity, this Government’s performance in Treaty negotiations is lamentable. Just one settlement has been taken from start to finish in more than 8 years. Despite all the talk and the ninth floor Goebbels department Government spin, Government members are a failure. They stand condemned for negligence in conducting one of the most important historical projects in the life of this country. It was commenced by Mat Rata in 1975 when the tribunal was established, and continued in the 1990s with the magnificent work of Doug Graham and Jim Bolger. I can understand Labour’s desire to erase from memory the appalling administration of two earlier Ministers in charge of Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations, but it cannot be done. This Government has to take its medicine.

Then the Deputy Prime Minister puts on the hat of Attorney-General. He is a flop in that area as well. I note from the Estimates that legal advice and representation by Crown Law will cost a lot more this year; I certainly hope it will improve. Just last week we had the debacle of the Amalgamated Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union case. The union appeared before the Justice and Electoral Committee advocating strongly for the Electoral Finance Bill, yet it was in court the other week saying that the Electoral Finance Act inhibited freedom of expression and the union was the first victim. Crown Law gave advice on the meaning of the word “person” in section 13 of the Act. It was an appalling exercise in statutory interpretation. Even a first-year law student would have said that to interpret section 13(2)(f) one must look at section 13(1), but the Crown Law opinion glossed over that.

Where do the failures end? The Government has run out of ideas in arts, culture, and heritage, and has to resort to promoting impractical schemes like resale royalties for artists. It has made no attempt to address difficult issues in the arts like sustainability for recurrently funded organisations. The Prime Minister does not seem to realise that the arts portfolio involves more than self-promotion, and that it is not enough to delegate to the Associate Minister, Judith Tizard, who is not up to the challenge. These are just a sample of the failings in the areas in which I have responsibility.

The reality is that this Government has run out of ideas and has run out of energy. In describing it I can do no better than quote from Disraeli’s magnificent speech at Manchester in 1872, when he said this about Gladstone’s failing administration: “As I sat opposite the Treasury Bench the Ministers reminded me of one of those marine landscapes not very unusual on the coasts of South America. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest.” A range of exhausted volcanoes—what better imagery is there to describe the front bench of this tired and useless Government?