Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement

I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. We might have misheard, but when Dr Cullen started his speech there was a degree of noise. We believe he said—and we take offence at this—that New Zealand First was part of cutting the pensions for the elderly. We are in no way associated with that, and we strongly object.

💬 Mr SPEAKER: The member has made a debating point. It is not a point of order.

I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I thought of raising this point of order and stopping the Minister’s speech. Perhaps you might say that I should have done it then, but I am raising this under Speaker’s ruling 48/5, which states that temperate and decorous language should be used with regard to persons outside of Parliament. I cannot raise this matter in debate, because all our time is used up, but I think it was wrong for the Deputy Prime Minister to say in the House that a person outside the House, Mr Gibbs, is in favour of privilege. I happen to know Mr Gibbs very well and he is a distinguished New Zealand businessman. Yes, it is true that he wrote a health report for the last Labour Government, but if the Deputy Prime Minister looks at that report again, I think he will see that nowhere does it advocate privilege. I know that Mr Gibbs is on record many times as saying that he is personally very strongly opposed to privilege.

💬 Mr SPEAKER: That is neither intemperate nor indecorous, and it certainly is not outside the Standing Orders.

What is amazing to me is how a so quietly spoken and essentially dull a man as Dr Brash can excite such emotion. That was the most lively speech I have heard from Dr Cullen in quite a while, but I must take issue with him when he claims that Dr Brash wants Māori to be illiterate, because I, for one, know that that is certainly not the case. I have heard Dr Brash speak at a number of conferences. One was the Ngāti Kahungunu economic summit and the other was the education summit, and I thought that his prescription for Māori education and the development of the Māori economy was absolutely spot on. I thought at the time that he had the makings of being one of the most important politicians of the new millennium. He was not at that time a member of Parliament.

The second time I heard him speak he was not the leader of the National Party, but he certainly had the seeds of leadership within him as he spoke. He talked about education, and the importance of choice. He talked about kōhanga reo and kura kaupapa Māori as being examples of choice. I think the important point that he has made, surely, is that we must have policies that work for all, and in his description of choice as one of the key ways we achieve that, I certainly could not agree with him more. Where we have individuals who can make their own choices, as in kura and in kōhanga reo, we know that people will develop. I thought also that when he talked about education and set standards in assessment I could not have agreed with him more.

The other area where I agreed with him most was in his discussion on literacy and the importance of every New Zealander being able to read and write to world-class standards. For the first time in the 7 years I have been in this Parliament, I heard a man talk about reading with as much passion as I do myself. I talked about closing the gap between Māori and non-Māori reading achievement. I heard him prescribe the way we could get teachers to do that—by offering standards, by offering assessments, by offering support to teachers, and by retraining and all the rest of it, thus bringing reading research right down into the classroom.

When I heard that, I was excited—as excited as I was when he rolled Bill English. But I have to take issue with the way he has marketed his policies to New Zealand, and certainly with the way he has set the ground rules or created an environment where now there is an open season on Māori. I feel that in doing that he is taking us back to the 1970s and 1980s—an era that I for one never want to return to. If members can remember the mentality of the 1970s and 1980s, they will know that it was an era where more New Zealand high schools had the Japanese language available than the Māori language, where we had the regional superintendent of Auckland education saying: “Over my dead body will that barbaric language of Māori be introduced into any school in my region.”, and where we had legislation, like the Maori Land Act, by which Māori land could be taken—just like that; at the whim of Government—if someone deemed it uneconomic. I, for one, never want to return to those days, but I fear that is where Dr Brash is taking us.

When Dr Brash said that there had been a huge pent-up feeling of frustration and anger on the part of a large number of people, and that they were now saying: “Thank heavens! We now feel able to say we are concerned about this.”, I fear that what Dr Brash is really saying is: “If you hate Māori, please say so. Don’t feel frustrated about it. Let your feelings out. Don’t worry about what Māori think. Their feelings don’t matter.” I believe that the real story is how most Pākehā have maintained cultural separation after being here for so long—how they still cannot pronounce, let alone speak, the Māori language.

I have to say to Dr Brash: “Māori are still fragile, so please stick to choice in education, stick to fixing the economy, stick to freedom of choice, and do not, whatever you do, allow Pākehā to give vent to their frustrations and anger.” Therein lies danger for all New Zealanders.

💬 Mr SPEAKER: The time for this debate has concluded.