Winston Peters Replies

The Prime Minister wants the House to express its confidence in the National Government – well we don’t!

That plan outlined by the Prime Minister for 2014 brought to mind the word Hoover.

Not the great water dam, not the first FBI boss – but the vacuum cleaner.

Why? Because it sucks!

John Key has spent too long running around after the movie moguls.

He’s in his own Fantasyland.

His speech had the most confused start we have ever heard.

His speech should have been an honest and objective statement of the conditions facing the country – the challenges ahead - and the solutions the Government has to offer.

Instead, it was spin and manipulation.

New Zealand Prime Ministers of the past would have been embarrassed to have spouted such drivel!

National is a government of non-achievers with a woeful record of failure.

It always puts the interests of foreign big business ahead of ordinary Kiwis.

It keeps selling valuable state assets in a process that can only be characterised as economic madness.

Here are some of the many examples of economic failure.

150,000 New Zealanders are unemployed while immigrant work visas and permanent residencies are sold like expensive bus tickets.

There is a housing crisis but the Government refuses to acknowledge that migrant numbers and overseas speculators are creating havoc and cheating Kiwis out of a decent home.

Nothing has been done to address the massive overseas debt – and it’s still rising.
The exchange rate is crippling exporters and manufacturers, and again the Government refuses to act.

Worse still it contemplates an official cash rate rise which will boot up mortgage rates and kick the exchange rate even higher.

Let us look specifically at the economy.

No effort will be spared by the National Party to pump up the feel good factor in advance of the 2014 election.

There will be lots of talk of an economy firing on all cylinders.

No effort will be made to dispel or challenge the spin that New Zealand is a rock star - a super star economy.

A responsible Government would have immediately corrected this sort of false and misleading clap trap.

Let me sound a warning about this rock star economy.

Treasury has never won a Grammy award for the accuracy of its forecasts.

Only a few days ago one of the tax forecasts was shown to be hundreds of millions out in just one area!

National aided and abetted by its pet intellectuals – bank economists, money traders and corporate cheerleaders - will put a positive spin on every bit of economic news – even when it’s bad.

The facts are staring us in the face.

Our manufacturers and exporters will get no help with an overvalued dollar.

Bill English said so today about our rising parity with the Aussie dollar.

It’s going up by the day and will keep going up if interest rates are increased.

In fact National could not care less if every manufacturer closed or moved offshore.

There’s no basis for this National Government to boast about its economic record.

Export prices for dairy products have been at record levels.

And the fact is that New Zealand is the beneficiary of the best terms of trade for 40 years.

There is nothing great or glorious about 150,000 unemployed?

What is so brilliant about creating a speculative housing bubble for foreign speculators in Auckland?

Is this part of some brilliant economic plan known only to the inner circle?

New Zealand’s external balance sheet is still in an awful state.

And the strong Kiwi dollar will keep pushing things in the wrong direction.

Over the past five years of National Government we have failed to diversify our economy base.

We are now even more vulnerable to a “black swan”, an unforeseen event or shock.

We have an economy characterised by:

• one dominant export product - milk powder
• one dominant export company - Fonterra
• one dominant export market - China
• one dominant import – people - immigration

The stark – ugly truth is that New Zealand is nowhere near paying its way in the world.

And it is clear that this Government is clueless as to how to address that.

Young New Zealanders have been betrayed by this Government.

They have seen their hopes of home ownership snatched away.

Barely any young couple can save at the speed of soaring house inflation.

Few of those MPs over there can either!

They struggle under the burden of student debt – and their prospects of a decent, secure and well-paying job have trashed by wholesale immigration.

Immigration is the most thriving and corrupt industry in New Zealand.

Incredibly over 150,000 migrant work visas were issued in the year to June 2013.

Today the Prime Minister announced more work visas and the whole process of issuing visas is going to be sped up.

Apply online, get a visa online, come to New Zealand and take a Kiwi’s job.

This is madness.

It’s got to stop.

And a point - the Prime Minister just claimed in the House the movie “The Hobbit” created five and a half thousand jobs.

That’s bulldust.

Let me read the true numbers directly from his office in his own words.

“If he’s asked about Labour’s industrial relations policy and how it might impact on the NZ film industry he can say something like “about 3000 people will work on the Hobbit movies, if that policy had been in place then all those people might never have got a job.”

Misleading the House again.

The Government has no idea of who or what is coming into the country.

Why should New Zealanders give up their jobs to immigrants?

The Government is not loyal to New Zealanders.

Sure, it’s a government for the people – the people of China, India – you name it.
Anywhere but New Zealand.

This winter is going to be tough.

Jobs will be hard to get.

Power Bills are going through the roof.

The statement about increasing competition in the electricity industry is garbage.

The electricity industry is a price fixing cartel.

Domestic consumers pay up to three times more for their power than the big companies.

We’ve done the work on this.

Domestic and some business consumers are getting ripped off.

How can you control power prices when you sell your power companies?

It’s clearly an exercise in deception.

Just like the Broadband roll out.

A Southern Cross conglomerate of Telecom and Chorus are exploiting New Zealanders and the Government is paying them more than a billion dollars to do it.

This cost is double what it should be.
Somehow the Government is trying to put across that it’s doing consumers a favour when they’re actually being ripped off.

Just like the plan for the police.

It’s all about glib words that are total nonsense.

The Government is going to reduce the rate of crime by 15 per cent, the rate of violent crime by 20 per cent and the rate of youth crime by 25 per cent.

In all my years in this House I have never heard such a brazen abuse of statistics.

It sounds like something taken out of the police files in North Korea!

Has the Government told the offenders how much to reduce their offending?

Who is negotiating with the criminal community over these statistics?

It’s an absolute fact that if you don’t have sufficient law enforcement resources, then you won’t have the capacity to fight crime and much crime will go unreported.

That’s what happening.

No so long ago, New Zealand First put an extra thousand police on the beat.

We believe in fighting crime not fiddling statistics!

There is concern about the number of young Māori offenders in our prison population.

The best way to reduce these statistics is to give them jobs.

A quarter of them are unemployed!

All the Whānau Ora mumbo jumbo referred to in the statement will not help.

Instead of tackling Māori unemployment, health, housing and education, the Government is throwing taxpayers money at the Māori Party’s dangerous revival of tribalism.

Once again there is no proper pan Māori approach.

Any programme designed to help Māori in the areas we covered should be across New Zealand.

Not the Minister’s favourite tribes.

Ask the Māori Womens Welfare League.

Once New Zealand had a clear direction.

We were a strong and vibrant democracy with a good standard of living using our own New Zealand resources.

We had excellent standards of education and health services.

We had an effective public service that served the public impartially.

We were inclusive – and everyone got a fair go.

None of that that means a thing for this Government.

Because it only serves the interests of the well to do – the corporate elite and their cronies.

When it goes to the election later this year, the Government’s legacy after 6 years in office will be of gross mismanagement and failure.

New Zealand First will continue to expose the failings of the Government and put forward positive polices for improving the lot of ordinary Kiwis.

New Zealanders can count on us to cut through the Government’s spin, deception and deceit and show what’s really happening.

And there is a give-away in the Prime Minister’s speech – on the second to last page.

Where he refers to safeguarding New Zealand sport he says and I quote…”taking steps this year to introduce a national match fixing policy….etc”

That’s what we’ve heard today.

National’s match fixing policy for the election.

If you can’t win the game – cheat – fix it.

Well, we are alert and ready…to hand out a card –

It won’t be red

It won’t be green and

It won’t be yellow.

It’ll be black and white.

The colours of New Zealand First.

ENDS

© Scoop Media