Sludge Report #21 – Beasts In The House

Thursday, 6 July 2000, 4:50 pm
Column: C.D. Sludge

NOTE: Authors of this report will be anonymous and wide ranging. Indeed you are invited to contribute: The format is as a reporters notebook. It will be published as and when material is available. C.D. Sludge can be contacted at sludge@scoop.co.nz. The Sludge Report is available as a free email service..Click HERE
href="http://www.scoop.co.nz/cgi-bin/newsagent/new_user.cgi?form=home to subscribe...

Parliament's Joker, Grant Gillon MP,
Not The First Member To Comment On Members And Animals

Sludge Report #21

The following are a series of colourful quotations made by members in the NZ Parliament. They have been compiled from news media reports. As can be seen, the remark made by Grant Gillon on Tuesday - “I ask the minister whether, no pun intended, it is appropriate in this case for a woman's body parts to be inserted into a sheep when that's normally been the domain of Tory males?" - is not the first offensive remark made in the house linking members and animals.

"A bunch of stuffed dummies with yellow bellies."

-- Jenny Bloxham on Labour MPs

"Mr Peters, every day, more and more resembles John Cleese in that great film Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail, with arms and legs chopped off, bleeding from every stump, challenging people to come near and fight him. Listen to him on Morning Report -- goodness me! How one gets a male of 51 years old to sound as though he is suffering from extreme pre-menstrual tension I do not know."

-- Michael Cullen

"I am sure this matter is not covered in the standing orders, but I do not think it is right and appropriate that someone in this House should be mauled by a wet lamb."

-- Winston Peters on Michael Cullen

"Don McKinnon is not a National Party poodle, he is more like a soft-eyed Labrador, one of those that lick people whenever they see them."

-- Annette King

"It is a party of poll-driven fruit flies. We have seen a few eggs laid and a few larvae emerging."

-- Paul Swain on NZ First

"I object to being called a little larva sitting down the back. Frankly, I do not intend to take that from any little worm at the front."

-- Peter Brown to Paul Swain

"He sounds like a dog with a cleft palate, but he is really a duck!"

-- Winston Peters to Trevor Mallard

"In this House there are woofters and there are warriors and the public knows the difference. Tuku's awesome counterattack . . . left no doubt where the eagles soar and the turkeys gobble -- and the ducks quack."

-- Rana Waitai defends Tuku Morgan -- and takes a dig at Trevor Mallard

"One does not need to have the little pitbull terrier trying to bite one's testicles off."

-- Michael Cullen to Winston Peters

"In your case, that would be a physical impossibility."

-- Winston Peters to Michael Cullen

"Will this programme for endangered species take into account the special problem of the Tauranga turncoat, that blue-bellied, yellow-backed endangered species?"

-- Mike Moore on Winston Peters

"The workhorse has been sidelined for the show pony."

-- Paul Swain on Bill Birch and Winston Peters

"When the member wears them, they say `which one is the dirty dog?'."

-- Trevor Mallard on Tau Henare's Dirty Dog sunglasses

"It is like putting Jack the Ripper in charge of the women's refuge . . . it is like the Ayatollah calling in a Protestant to run the Muslim religion in Iran."

Michael Cullen on Winston Peters being in charge of the Reserve Bank Act

"He has always tended to see the open, internationally competitive economy as some kind of Jewish/Masonic/Catholic/Ku Klux Klan plot."

-- Michael Cullen on Winston Peters

"Be fair, the Treasurer cannot get up early in the morning and listen."

-- Michael Cullen

"When I heard Mr Bolger and Mr Peters use the word honesty this afternoon, I kept expecting Charles Manson to come out giving tips on safety about the home."

-- Pam Corkery

"The Associate Treasurer is the one doing the work because the Treasurer has important public business late at night, carrying out urgent consultation all around the city. The Associate Treasurer has to do all the work because the Treasurer never sleeps."

-- Mark Peck

"Like rust."

-- Michael Cullen

"Last night, in the precincts of this House -- the lobby -- I had a dispute with the honourable John Banks on a matter about which he is clearly upset. I wish to tender my apology to him unreservedly."

-- Winston Peters apologises

"Had there been a fair charge formulated, and I got a fair hearing on that, and if I was then found guilty, I would apologise. I was not, and, therefore, I will not."

-- Winston Peters refuses to apologise twice

"This report smells. It reeks, like the alcohol on Mr Peters's breath that night."

-- Jim Anderton

"Don't make me laugh."

-- Winston Peters declines Jeanette Fitzsimons's suggestion that he undergo anger management counselling

"He's still drunk from last night, put a breathalyser on him . . . he's had a hard night followed by a long lunch."

-- Trevor Mallard on Winston Peters

"If anybody looks like a fonged drunkard, she does."

-- Winston Peters to Pam Corkery

"I apologise without embellishment."

-- Mike Moore, when asked by the Speaker to apologise without embellishment

"Some people can't help being childish."

-- Speaker Doug Kidd

"Some people make South African referees under (South African Rugby Union president) Louis Luyt look like (retired Appeal Court president) Lord Cooke of Thorndon."

-- Trevor Mallard on Deputy Speaker Ian Revell

"The Opposition parties are making big Joe Hunts out of themselves."

-- Jenny Bloxham

"Clever buttocks."

-- Michael Cullen, banned by the Speaker from calling Neil Kirton "smart arse"

"I really don't know what to do at times, the way you treat this House. Quite frankly, it's a disgrace."

-- Doug Kidd

"The House has to learn a bit of self-restraint . . . if I had to enforce it, I would be here by myself half the time. That is an exaggeration, I would be here by myself a quarter of the time. I do not actually want to be a hermit."

-- Doug Kidd

"I do suggest we don't want to get to the point where there are more words crossed out in the dictionary than the ones we are allowed to use. Some of us with somewhat larger vocabularies will simply use more obscure words that some of the other members do not recognise so quickly."

-- Michael Cullen protests against the ruling that MPs could not call the Government sleazy

"More positions than the Kamasutra."

-- Helen Clark on Jim Bolger's stance on superannuation

"The only reason he still looks like he's the prime minister is because he's been clocked. Somebody has wound him back."

-- Trevor Mallard on Jim Bolger

"With customers like you, I can see why!"

-- Winston Peters on Jill Pettis's claim that banks won't open branches in Patea

"The member doesn't have any friends."

-- Rodney Hide on Gerry Brownlee

"I have more friends than that member has. Rodney Hide is the only man who has to drive around Wellington in a taxi so that someone will talk to him."

-- Gerry Brownlee

"We started a party at the grassroots of ordinary New Zealanders, not like somebody with a whole lot of tax cheats behind him. The ACT party is clearly the Association of Consultants and Tax-dodgers."

-- Winston Peters

"Five times a day the members of ACT face towards wherever Roger Douglas is in the world and praise the Reserve Bank Act."

-- Michael Cullen

"And those naughty Poles started World War II."

-- Mike Moore rejects suggestions that Labour caused unemployment

"In about 10 years' time, when Bill English has learned to shave, he will emerge, I am sure, as the new-wave leader of the National Party."

-- Steve Maharey

"I congratulate that member on a splendid speech, right out of the Cuban revolutionary school. It just goes to show what a Christchurch East boy can do if he gets a bit of that Fidel-type training."

-- Gerry Brownlee on Larry Sutherland

"Don't get ya knickers in a knot."

-- Jill Pettis to National MPs

"Pull back the Kirton and you'll find Michael Laws."

-- Mike Moore suggests Michael Laws exerts undue influence on Neil Kirton

"He thinks the current account is the electricity bill."

-- Michael Cullen on Winston Peters

"For that member's information, there is a train leaving town at five o'clock. Be under it."

-- Winston Peters to Jill Pettis

"I have been accused of vanity, and everyone knows that I am one of the most modest people in this Parliament."

-- Winston Peters

"New hope, new heart, new hairdo."

-- Winston Peters rewrites Labour's slogan to encompass Helen Clark's hair

"I have always regarded the Fiscal Responsibility Act as a piece of fluff and nothing more. It is a piece of detritus from Ruth Richardson's tracksuit."

-- Michael Cullen

"All we get from this minister is a barrage of personal attacks, abuse and aggression from a little man who was once a shoe salesman."

-- Larry Sutherland on Roger Sowry

"The lecturer from the University of Otago has the temerity to think that, because Dougie Myers sent him overseas to get a lesson on economics, he is now an expert. He is an economic illiterate and a joke. He will never understand economics because he has no experience of running anything except the Canterbury University tuck shop."

-- Winston Peters on Michael Cullen

"We would never give him a portfolio because we didn't think that snooker warranted it."

-- Paul Swain on Jack Elder

"I can still run faster than him on the rugby field."

-- John Carter on Trevor Mallard

"I will never be caught with my pants down again . . . I put my shortcomings down to youthful over-exuberance and inexperience."

-- Tukoroirangi Morgan, aged 38

"None of this would have happened if Jim Bolger was still alive."

-- Mike Moore on yet another Tuku disaster

"He stays on in this place doing that appalling imitation of Marlon Brando on Mogadon. He makes the Ingham twins look like the very model of loquaciousness. Indeed, he is to politics what the Ingham twins are to travel: an incompetent freeloader."

-- Michael Cullen on Tukoroirangi Morgan

"Watching the Prime Minister and his new deputy battling over who is hogging the bed sheets and who is going to go on top -- while the rest of the country drowns in the wet patch."

-- Pam Corkery

"It does not matter who is on top, providing they are both generally facing towards each other and providing that they belong to different genders . . . the menage a trois aspect that the Alliance would have brought to the arrangement was quite scary to us country boys on this side of the House."

-- Rana Waitai

"Let us all just pack up, go home and lick whatever part of his body he cares to thrust at Parliament."

-- Michael Cullen on Winston Peters

"I raise a point of order. I know that there is an enormous affection for me on the part of the Labour Party, but members should not be allowed to refer to me by my first name, and in his case, it should be "Sir".

-- Winston Peters

"I take a point of order. I take offence at the use of the word `boy'. The use of the word `boy' is to some offensive in nature in terms of its use in southern Africa. Some members of the Labour Party can roll their eyeballs. I particularly do not like to be called or referred to as `boy'."

-- Tau Henare

"Just last week I was going down one of the main thoroughfares in Invercargill and some high school students said `Mr Roy,come here'. I walked over and they said: `Can we draw some rabbits on top of your head? From a distance it might look like a few hairs.' "

-- Eric Roy keeps up his sense of humour despite losing all his hair through chemotherapy treatment for cancer

"I have just heard that he used his FlyBuy cards in Bellamys for goodness sake. He is the perk-buster of the century."

-- Tau Henare on Rodney Hide

"It's amazing that someone so interested in saving this planet spends so little time on it."

-- Lockwood Smith on Jeanette Fitzsimons

"I stand here as a dispossessed person and recognise that I need to be here to speak to this House."

-- Alamein Kopu

"New Zealand's leading lemon sucker."

-- Winston Peters on Jim Anderton

© Sludge 2000

© Scoop Media

Alastair Thompson

Scoop Publisher

Alastair Thompson is the co-founder of Scoop. He is of Scottish and Irish extraction and from Wellington, New Zealand. Alastair has 24 years experience in the media, at the Dominion, National Business Review, North & South magazine, Straight Furrow newspaper and online since 1997. He is the winner of several journalism awards for business and investigative work.

Contact Alastair Thompson

• Linkedin
• Twitter - @althecat
• Facebook
• Email - alastair@scoop.co.nz