Financial Review Debate — Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet

We once had a great Prime Minister in the National Party and he governed for longer than anyone in the National Party. His name was Keith Holyoake, and he did all that in very trying and difficult times with five people in his office. His name, as I say, was Keith Holyoake. He was not a greatly academic, educated person, but easily the most competent National Party leader that there ever was. For over half this past century we have had in New Zealand some great Prime Ministers and Cabinet Ministers who did great things. Unhappily for the people of this once great country we no longer have a great Prime Minister, and he certainly does not have a great Cabinet. But my real point is this: why does the Prime Minister need, if you take all the people who work for him, not 126 but about 150 people in his service? It is 150 if you add it all up. It is 150 people for a Prime Minister who posed as being the best economic and financial brain this country had ever had because he went to the United States and was trained by Merrill Lynch. Why on earth the country would trust someone whose training came from Merrill Lynch and whose company and its ilk took the Western World to the worst global financial crisis since 1929 I would not know. But as time goes by, New Zealanders will wake up to the fact that this man has had no training at all to run this country, that he has no economic principles, and that he has fewer social ones when it comes to running a fair country.

Why does he need so many people to run his office when a man like Holyoake needed so fewer? The answer is he cannot trust his Ministers. He has to have somebody spying on them all. They do not do a very good spying job. Oh, yes they do! I know, Madam Minister, that somebody is in the Prime Minister’s office watching you right now—not you, Mr Chairman. They are watching the performance. Mind you, that Minister starts from a flying start, because the person she inherited the job from was absolutely and totally incompetent. That was another choice made by the Prime Minister. He may have made a correct one in this Minister’s case, but the last one was the least qualified person in the whole of Parliament to be a Cabinet Minister. Why is it, for example, that this Prime Minister has his holidays in Hawaii or Europe? What is wrong with New Zealand? What is wrong with—

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order!

No, no, no, it is an explanatory matter, and I will tell you how.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): We are actually on the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet—the department. If the member wishes to look at page 352, he might actually bring the debate back to what is on those pages.

I most certainly will. Mr Chairman, you should be aware that when he travels, unlike others in the past, he demands to take his security with him, and that is a taxpayers’ cost assigned to his department, right? That is a fact. Tell me this: why can he not holiday in New Zealand without taking these people all on the plane, probably going business class, all as security? Worse still, why can we not access this House during the day when Parliament is sitting without having to walk behind these guys who are about 6 feet 5 inches tall, stopping members of Parliament accessing the very place that they have been elected to, all at the taxpayers’ cost?

The answer is the boy from the State house has forgotten where he comes from. He has forgotten where he comes from. He loves the rich life. He loves the baubles and joy of it all. He loves the travel. Oh yes, because to go to Hawaii with your bodyguards is, in an atmospheric sense when it comes to the profession, merely a bauble. He does not have to go there. Or, if he has to go there, why can he not go there and rely upon the local security? No, no, no, not him. He has to be like somebody from a Third World, dynastic dictatorship. The last person I saw do that was a guy called Saddam Hussein.

💬 Hon David Cunliffe: Mu’ammer Gaddafi.

Yes, Mu’ammer Gaddafi. In fact, with Gaddafi, the Chinese Foreign Minister said to me that one time this man called Gaddafi came to China and he had 26 magnificently built bodyguards, all 6 feet tall, all beautiful, all women. Then in English, he said: “Good, eh?”. That is the parallel.

Report noted.

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