Winston Peters: You Get What You Vote For!
new-zealand-first-party
Thu May 31 2012 12:00:00 GMT+1200 (New Zealand Standard Time)
Winston Peters: You Get What You Vote For!
Thursday, 31 May 2012, 1:13 pm
Speech: New Zealand First Party
Rt Hon Winston Peters
New Zealand First Leader
Address: Western Bay of Plenty Grey Power AGM
Date: 31 May 2012
Time: 1pm
Venue: Wesley Church, 13th Avenue, Tauranga
“You Get What You Vote For!”
There is a question that should be asked at the start of this speech and that is: “How many of you voted National at the last election?”
Don’t be shy – have the courage of your convictions!
It’s important to think about how we vote and to work out what we actually vote for.
Now for those of you who voted National some more questions:
• Did you know that you were voting for tougher tax policies for paper boys, the kids who deliver pamphlets or wash your car?
• Did you know you were voting for increased class sizes in the schools around here?
• Did you know you were voting for sending a thousand New Zealanders a week to Australia?
• Did you know you were voting for privatising the welfare system?
• Did you know that you were voting for increased profits for the Australian owned banks?
• Did you know you were voting for the sale of the Crafar farms to China? We did warn you!
• Did you know that you were voting for continuing low wages for the kind people who work in the eldercare sector?
Don’t say that you did not know you were voting to sell our power stations and give away control of our waterways, rivers and lakes.
National made it clear that’s what they were going to do.
So if there is a feeling of guilt that you helped sell your country down the drain – and you were told it was going to happen - our advice is to learn to live with it.
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There’s more to come.
You will watch your country being asset stripped over the next two years.
This was always going to happen when National and their cronies gained a second term.
Too many New Zealanders seem to suffer from a form of political sado-masochism
Many parts of the Western world are having big economic problems.
These problems were not caused by ordinary people but ordinary people are bearing the brunt of the economic pain being dished out.
And there is worse to come make no mistake. Just look at the eldercare sector.
The treatment of the rest home workers and the carers who look after the elderly in their homes is a national disgrace.
These dedicated people look after some of the most frail and vulnerable members of our society.
For a lot of people growing old is not easy. They need help with the ordinary daily tasks of life that most of us take for granted.
We are talking about people who need help to have a shower, cook a meal, or just do the washing.
And there are those in residential care – also reliant on the kindness of someone else.
The faceless people and their political masters who decide to reduce real funding to the eldercare sector should be made to work a month in a rest home for the minimum wage.
Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner Judy McGregor who went undercover to get a picture of life working in this sector deserves a medal.
Her report, Caring Counts, said aged-care workers were paid too little compared with similar jobs in places such as hospitals.
The report recommended phasing in pay increases over three years until community-based workers are paid the same as those paid directly by district health boards.
So in effect a two tier system has developed between two sets of workers who do similar jobs.
Many receive only the minimum wage and if they have to use their own vehicles to travel to help with home care – they receive much less than that paid to others.
This situation should not be allowed to continue.
Perhaps it’s time to remind you that New Zealand First increased funding for the elder care sector by more than half a billion dollars between 2005 and 2008.
It was a major part of our confidence and supply agreement with the Labour Party.
Now everything has slipped behind.
Costs and wages have not and are not keeping up with inflation.
New Zealand First is working with the eldercare sector to try to restore some sort of parity and acknowledgement of the work that’s being done.
The Budget was also cruel to the elderly in its treatment of the assets held by those with a family member in residential care.
A $10,000-a-year rise in the threshold at which asset testing kicks in has been scrapped in favour of an annual inflation adjustment instead.
This is a sneaky attack aimed at asset stripping the elderly.
The figure was set at $210,000 with an annual increase of $10,000 but that figure has been reduced to the inflation rate – a big drop in many cases and it’s much worse for retired couples than singles..
This is a punishment dished out to those who save for their retirement and own their own home.
At this stage we must point out that while the Budget was mean to the elderly and the paper boys, there is plenty for the Maori Party slush fund Whanau Ora.
Last Sunday we were in Kaikohe – a town in Northland – where many Maori are living in poor conditions.
There is very little work and there have been reliable reports that some children have been eating food scraps set aside to feed the pigs.
This is terrible.
Yet the Maori Party is throwing millions at Whanau Ora so selected Maori people can work on their “connectedness” whatever that might be.
The only connection needed by Maori is connection to a job – healthcare and decent housing and education.
Northland has high levels of unemployment .
Maori there are signing up in their hundreds to work in the mineral industry in Australia.
What does that mean to you?
Well it means to me that they are willing to work but there are no jobs.
The lack of work and the loss of opportunity in this country is driving thousands of Kiwis across the Tasman.
When John Key promised pay parity with Australians he was careful not to explain that to get pay parity, New Zealanders actually had to go and work across the ditch.
More than 400,000 have already gone and if the current exodus continues there’ll be a million of us there in ten years.
These are the people we cannot afford to lose.
They are our tradespeople, our IT specialists, our professionals and those with a bit of grunt.
We need them to help pull us out of the mire.
Instead, as one planeload of Kiwis heads out, a planeload of immigrants comes in as part of some sort of twisted repopulation policy.
New immigrants are prepared to work long hours for low wages.
That’s because they will do anything to get away from the conditions in the places they come from.
New Zealand First – contrary to some reports – is not anti-immigrant.
If we have a genuine shortage of a skill in specific area there is no reason not to use someone overseas with specific skills.
But this should not be used as an excuse to avoid training our own people.
Now – some matters for GreyPower members.
As promised last year New Zealand First is trying to get SuperGold Cardholders a ten per cent winter power discount.
We tried to get it in the Budget but it was rejected out of hand by the prime minister.
As you are only too well aware - all power companies are increasing their electricity prices.
Our plan is to get state-owned power companies to invoke the social responsibility clause in the SOE Act to get about $100 off your winter power bill.
Under our scheme the cheaper electricity would be supplied by the three State Owned Enterprise-power generators - Might River Power, Meridian and Genesis.
The cost of the discount scheme to the highly profitable state-owned power companies would be about $34 million a year but these companies would benefit from a larger customer base.
We had everything ready – the research papers – the legislation – we were ready to go but John Key would not even talk to us about it.
We are undaunted – and will be putting forward a private members bill to try to shame the government doing something to help seniors..
We are also making good progress designing a scheme to bring more health benefits to SuperGold card holders.
We are doing the maths and finding some startling results.
Working on one free doctors’ visit and five consultations capped at ten dollars a visit, the annual cost is about 90 million dollars.
As you know prevention is the best part of cure.
If one of you chooses not go to the doctor with a throat infection because of the cost and you end up in hospital with pneumonia, it will cost about $1200 a day on average.
In two weeks that cost is almost $17,000.
So if you take into account the cost of a long hospital stay and the long term cost of care afterwards, our plan will actually save money.
New Zealand First wants this health check system for all people with a SuperGold Card.
We are preparing legislation for this as well as the power scheme.
During this term of Parliament New Zealand First deliberately went into Opposition.
We made that very clear during the election campaign.
Now that we are back in Parliament there are some things we don’t like – that have changed over the three years between 2008 and 2011.
The people who run Parliament are trying to make it run like some government department.
Winston Churchill – that great defender of democracy – pointed out that democracy was a very untidy form of government, except no one had thought of a better system.
Somehow, someone over the past three years has tried to “tidy up democracy” in New Zealand according to their version of how it should operate..
They forgot that parliament is a House of Representatives of the people.
Have any of you ever served on a committee of an organisation?
Have you ever been a member of a sports club working bee?
Just imagine a group of committees – totalling 121 people – sitting around discussing something.
Naturally it’s a bit untidy – especially when people have strong opinions on issues and are prepared to voice these strongly.
Democracy is stronger when dissenting voices are allowed to voice their dissent.
A government is only as good or bad as the opposition allows.
We would prefer a more flexible approach in parliament to allow a better flow of ideas.
We would also prefer the prime minister and his ministers to spend more time in the House and take more of an active part in proceedings.
As it is they pop down for question time three days a week when parliament is sitting except the PM only turns up twice a week, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
This is what the Prime Minister said yesterday in response to a question from an MP.
“None of the above. Someone who has to come to the House on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and answer questions from buffoons like him.”
Does that sound like arrogance to you?
It’s surely not too much to ask him to spend more than two and a half hours a week on democracy.
But that is what you get when you vote for National!
ENDS
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