Peters: Patriots or Traitors?
new-zealand-first-party
Wed Jun 01 2011 12:00:00 GMT+1200 (New Zealand Standard Time)
Peters: Patriots or Traitors?
Wednesday, 1 June 2011, 11:57 am
Speech: New Zealand First Party
EMBARGOED AGAINST DELIVERY
Rt. Hon Winston Peters
Leader NZ First
Address to: Auckland
Fickling Centre
536 Mount Albert Rd
Three Kings
Date: 1 June 2011
Time: 11.20 am
Patriots or Traitors, and are the gangs included?”
Thank you for asking me to speak here today.
I have come with a very blunt and plain message – and that message is that unless we open our eyes we won’t see what is happening to our country and in our country.
The future of New Zealand is at stake – and that of countless generations of New Zealanders.
And why is this?
It's simple – and it is happening on two fronts.
The first is that our country is being sold out from under our feet.
And the second threat is the emergence of a separate state within our country for the Treaty travellers and radicals under the guise of indigenous New Zealanders.
Each threat has to be met head on and dealt to with courage and conviction.
Our history shows that New Zealand has had to struggle for economic security.
We were once an economic colony of Britain but leaders of vision gave us nationhood.
They developed New Zealand, created farmland, transport systems, communications networks, ports and power stations.
It was a long hard struggle broken only by even greater struggles through two world wars and a great depression.
These leaders of vision throughout the generations created an egalitarian society that believed in equality of opportunity and a good standard of living for the people.
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They brought improved housing, better education and a system of health and welfare that was the envy of the Western world.
Everyone in this room can remember when there were plenty of well paid jobs.
How the situation has changed.
And you are being fooled into thinking that this government led by National and supported by the dysfunctional Act and Maori parties will lead you to the promised land.
The government's publicity machine works well on what we used to call the mushroom principle.
It works like this – you keep the people in the dark and feed them lots of manure!
The recent Budget was so full of manure it looked like a cowshed in Spring.
Let's look at just one example.
The Budget forecast 170,000 new jobs over the next four years.
The next week the government announced it was getting rid of 500 Army jobs.
And other job losses are now announced on almost a daily basis.
So on the one hand the government is creating new jobs while on the other it's either sacking people or, its policies are making firms lay off workers.
The Budget also announced the partial privatisation of some state assets.
In real terms that means selling your power stations and your airline.
Remember when the last National government sold the railways? National's mates like Fay Richwhite made hundreds of millions.
The taxpayers got the smell of an oily rag and, to prevent its collapse, then had to buy the railways back.
Privatisation milked it and then you were called upon to save it.
The same happened with Air New Zealand.
And now they are going to sell your power stations.
The government holds them in trust for the people of New Zealand. Past taxpayers and electricity consumers paid for them.
The Prime Minister says Mum and Dad investors will be given the chance to buy shares.
We assume he means the Mums and Dads who did not lose their money in shonky finance companies run by National's mates.
Or does he really mean the Mums and Dads who rule China with an iron fist?
You see there have been profound changes in the world because of the appalling standards of the finance and banking industries in the capitalistic West..
Their unrestrained greed and corruption triggered the so-called financial crisis that has dragged on for the past few years.
The Chinese are smart people.
They did not get sucked into the mess created by the money men of the West.
China has a huge balance of payments surplus. China has huge sums to invest.
And it is now clear that as part of the Budget, the Finance Minister Bill English was in Asia acting as some sort of government salesman.
The Asian tigers have plenty of money to invest in countries like New Zealand.
They are buying government bonds and want to also buy farmland, and the processing plants that process the milk from our cows.
Leading economists have pointed out the folly of selling state assets and land to overseas investors.
None of the Asian countries trying to buy up in New Zealand will allow other countries to buy substantial industries or land in their homeland.
It has been proved that selling assets in the eighties and nineties caused serious balance of payments problems for this country.
It means that money is pouring out of the country to the foreign owners of the assets.
You only have to look at the billions of dollars taken out of New Zealand after the sale of Telecom and the Bank of New Zealand.
New Zealand is something like $20billion poorer as a result of asset sales.
We cannot understand how a National leader who is promoted as being smart with money can blindly forge ahead with such a plan.
And he's pushing on despite a strong indication that up to 80 percent of the people do not want these asset sales.
Mr Key's response to that is “We'll have to do a bit more work on it”.
In other words he is not dealing with the crucial argument over the wisdom of selling power stations.
The government is going to improve their public relations sales campaign by throwing millions more dollars at it. Your dollars, not his.
There is another downside to all the reports that China and other interests are sitting there with billions of dollars to spend.
The foreign exchange speculators and the finance dealers have pushed the value of the New Zealand dollar way over eighty cents.
As a trading nation we live or die by our exports.
If your currency is artificially inflated it hurts exports and encourages imports.
One commentator has even gone so far as to say this is an election bribe.
That is because consumer goods like television sets will get cheaper while the currency is high.
But the down side is that the countries who trade with us will go somewhere else.
Today I want to challenge the prime minister to a public debate on selling taxpayer assets.
Ideally the debate should take place on nationwide television.
He should have nothing to worry about if he is so confident of his policies.
Mr Key is welcome to name the time and place.
We will be ready.
There is something else the Prime Minister should clarify and that is whether his government is putting taxpayers' money into the Mongrel Mob and Black Power gangs.
We are suspicious about this because the government has cut $1.5 million from the Community Organisation Grants Scheme Budget.
The Cogs grants, of between $1000 and $15,000, are distributed by 37 local committees to about a 100 grassroots and voluntary organisations every year.
Community groups say reducing the $14m scheme's funding by 11 per cent will have a huge impact on the social services they provide at a time of increasing need.
The Community and Voluntary Sector Minister Tariana Turia has defended the government's decision to slash the Community Organisations Grants Scheme's budget.
She said the money would go to "hard to reach" communities that struggled to access support and resources, with each receiving $375,000 a year.
Now we thought “hard to reach” communities were those living in remote areas.
So we searched on the Internet to see exactly where they were.
Imagine our surprise when we found that “hard to reach” communities is also the term used the describe the Mongrel Mob and Black Power.
We think this situation should be clarified because we find it hard to believe the government would sink $1.5 million into criminal gangs.
You will all be aware of Budget cuts to KiwiSaver.
Any cutbacks to this retirement savings plan is very short-sighted and foolish.
It once again shows that a National government does not care about building up savings or ensuring that retired people have an adequate income.
The National Party scrapped the Norman Kirk superannuation plan in 1975.
In 1998 Jenny Shipley and Bill English cut the superannuation rate from 65 percent to 60 percent.
There are about 1.7 million people with KiwiSaver accounts, which begs the question:
Why is the government interfering in the personal superannuation contract of each of these people?
They say that the country can’t afford it.
Yet the country can afford billions to bail out the collapsed finance companies of National's mates.
And the government can put aside another billion to back insurance companies that somehow don’t have the funds when the claims start rolling in.
There is plenty of money when the government bails out their mates but ordinary people get shafted.
That is what is happening with KiwiSaver.
There is no need to cut it.
The government accounts are not in bad shape. We are being fed a steady stream of propaganda about the hopeless debt problem.
It is private debt – it is bank debt caused by foolish lending policies during the property boom.
Despite the doom and gloom for those at the bottom of the heap – those at the top are creaming it!
Remember this government, now crying poverty gave its mates some big tax cuts.
Look for example, at the boss of the Australian bank Westpac in New Zealand.
His salary was a reported $5.6 million dollars.
When National handed out tax cuts – the bank boss got more than $5,000 a week extra.
That's right, $5,000 a week extra on more than $260,000 a year – just in a tax cut.
Now for the unfairness of it all. Guess what happened to the workers?
National lifted the minimum wage by 25 cents an hour to $13 an hour.
That means someone on the minimum wage – and there are thousands of them – now receives just over $27,000 a year.
That amounts to about $437 a week take home pay.
It's easy to see the people this government is looking after.
If you are a bank boss on $5.6million, helping cause a recession, you get an extra five thousand a week.
If you are on the minimum wage – you get an extra 25 cents an hour.
There is some good news ahead and that is NZ First will continue looking after the most vulnerable in our society.
Last year we announced the extension of the SuperGold card into one free medical check a year and GP visits to be capped at ten dollars.
After November NZ First is going to take the SuperGold Card into energy cost saving.
We will be giving a discount of ten percent on the electricity bills of SuperGold cardholders.
This scheme will be based on the average annual units used by married couples and singles and we would have it operating by winter 2012.
Details will be announced later but the scheme's cost will be very modest after it has been set up.
Of course, we won't be paying to heat swimming pools or to run the family factory from grandma's place but cold damp houses are a health risk to senior citizens.
The cost of electricity has gone up at least ten percent since last winter and we hear too many reports of older people unable to afford power bills or scared to turn a heater on.
Now there is a thought I want to leave you with.
If you want your assets and your country sold from under your feet vote for John Key and Don Brash.
If you want to keep your country vote for New Zealand First.
It's as simple as that.
We want your party vote in November and we promise you it will not be wasted.
Future generations will thank you because they will be born into a country that is still rightfully theirs.
ENDS
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