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Bill English, MP

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542 Address in Reply; and Proposed Amendments 6 March tradition. I have to advise her-and she will have to work out the virtue of this-that the other two were Michael Bassett and Trevor Young. At least one of those two can provide a shining example.. The House is where we have the chance to talk, to confuse, and to get things wrong, but I say to the member for Hawke's Bay: "Don't ever think that it runs the country.". ' When I first came to the House and took a back-bench seat in the Opposition, fundamentalist groups used to write to me and say: "We're praying every week for your job in running the country.". I used to write back and say: "Look, I hope you've got the message through to the right person, because I'm the wrong joker.". I am here because I am part of a political process in which back-benchers are given certain rights; in which Parliament is a forum where they can hold the Executive to account; in which they can test the views of the Executive; in which they can express the views of their constituents, agonise over their affairs, and try to resolve some of their worst dilemmas; in which they have a licence to work in their electorate offices, paid for by the State; in which they will be competing with people who hate them; in which the press will have a crack at them; and in which there is an organ in Auckland called the New Zealand Herald that can abuse a former Prime Minister, the member for Tamaki, because he had a 4 percent increase in his retirement salary over a period of 2 years while the same paper 2 years ago cost 40c and today costs 60c. Members will be the victims of double standards in everything they do; they will be attacked when they do it right, and they will be attacked when they do it wrong. But there is one thing that new members should remember: "If you don't stick with your mates you're not likely to have a Government of any cohesion, and if you don't have a Government of any cohesion the very people that you purport to represent will suffer.". Tony Ryall: Is the member speaking from experience? Rt. Hon. DAVID LANGE: If the member says that I speak from experience, by God I do! BILL ENGLISH (Wallace): It is an honour to stand in the Parliament of New Zealand to speak as the representative for my own home, the electorate of Wallace. I congratulate Sir Paul and Lady Reeves on their term in office. They had an unusual ability somehow to shed the pomp and elevation of their office yet act with the dignity and respect that we would expect from representatives of the Queen. I also congratulate Dame Cath Tizard on her appointment as Governor-General. In her own way she will bring out yet another positive aspect of the New Zealand character. I pay tribute to some subjects of the Queen whom the Governor-General represents, including Mr John Shallard, a farmer from Wendonside, who thinks that because I have the good will to go back to my electorate every weekend he might come up to Wellington during the week to hear my maiden speech. The electors of Wallace do not often have a new member of Parliament. For 80 years Wallace has been the south-west comer of the country, and in that time it has had only 5 previous members of Parliament, 2 in the past 30 years. Brian Talboys had a distinguished career, and he retains to this day the stature, the sharpness of mind, and the dignity that made him one of the outstanding parliamentarians of my lifetime. Derek Angus, my predecessor, served his electorate through the hardest years it has ever seen. He worked silently and effectively without drawing attention to himself, unfashionable as that may be. The highest tribute I can pay him is that he left politics after 9 years the same man he entered it-a man of warmth, of dedication, and of unquestionable honesty. Wallace stretches from Big Bay above Milford Sound, east to Kingston, down to Gore, and south to Oreti Beach. It is the south-west comer of New Zealand, much of it rugged coastline with fiords of breathtaking grandeur, a million acres of mountains and bush untouched, some unexplored-! have never campaigned there-and all of it hostile and beautiful. Alongside that, there are thousands of acres of the best that can be wrought by man. The fertile land of Southland is walked by the feet of people who love it, who know it, and who sustain it. The early Maori crossed our plains from the south coast to Fiordland in search of their treasure, the pounamu, the greenstone. Then the early gold diggers passed from Bluff to Central Otago in search of their treasure. Now that land is peopled with the spirit of those who saw the treasure beneath their feet, and who stopped and cultivated the soil. I am proud to represent some of the few 6 March Address in Reply; and Proposed Amendments 543 people in New Zealand who can produce something with their own capital and expertise and sell it at a profit on the other side of the world. It was fashionable not so long ago to condemn us, with our provincial attitudes, our conservative ways, and our subsidies. Well, the big ideas have come and have gone and we are still in pusiness. Farm profits have collapsed to new lows, but my people have world-beating skills in production that are the envy of sophisticated, innovative, but, unfortunately, bust businesses in the big cities. We have been restructuring for 7 years now, and we have learnt some valuable lessons. The first is that economic survival, personal achievement, and social cohesion in the face of adversity are not all about profit and income. Our farms and our towns have survived because we are resilient, and we are resilient because we believe in what we do; we believe in our capacities; we believe in our way of life. We need to do better, of course. The need to market better what we produce so well is so often quoted it is a cliche. Brian Talboys mentioned it in his maiden speech in 1958. Thirty-two years on we are no more satisfied that we have it right. So much for progress. We have learnt some other valuable lessons from our 7 years of restructuring. Our communities are small but they are not defined just by the people in them but by the way that those people come together. So our services matter. They pull together the sparse threads of communities that are few in number-the schools, the medical services, the roads, the bridges. Those are not just bits and pieces that we can do without. They are, quite literally, the place from which we come, and therefore part of who we are. Gore, Winton, Te Anau, Riverton-those are my larger towns. They have a momentum of their own. They are doing OK. Our smaller towns and districts, however, are reaching a critical point at which the social fabric, threadbare from economic strain, is beginning to tear. Another lesson we have learnt is that, because politicians cannot do anything about the very few economic facts that actually matter, they do not talk much about them. Those are the terms of trade, or what we can import for a given quantity of exports, and productivity, or what we can produce in Wallace for a given unit of labour, capital, or land. The rest of the indicators-the deficit, the inflation rate, the exchange rate-make for easy politics, but they are peripheral to the creation and the distribution of wealth. The economic task of government in the future is one about which Wallace has some serious views, and a task of government in the future will be to keep the domestic environment stable wherever it can. Despite years of wishful rhetoric, New Zealand is still a farm with a forest on it. We will have a chance of getting more wealthy only if our exporters of those products have a fair chance. I can assure you, from my own continuing participation in the world market, that it is a roller-coaster, and we need every stable factor that we can get. The things that we ask of the Government-stability and consistency-are unspectacular; they are politically difficult and often unpopular, and it would not surprise me if they were not just a wee bit right wing. But politicians who want to indulge their instincts to do something to the country might well turn their attention to the way in which the spoils of successful rural capitalism are distributed. As a country, we should have started talking about those issues some time ago. As well as restructuring and related unemployment, a lot of things have happened in the past 6 or 7 years: flatter tax scales; the regressive goods and services tax; a boom and a massive bust in asset values; lower inflation; changes in the age of the population; changes in the make-up of the labour force and the work it does; and changes in the make-up of families and households. All of those things have a significant effect on the welfare of the people that we dare to govern, yet they are little understood by politicians.
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