Sunday 24th May 2009: Q+A’s panel this week – Paul Holmes, Therese Arseneau, former Local Government Minister and Alliance leader Sandra Lee and Invercargill Mayor, Tim Shadbolt.

The panel discussions have been transcribed below. The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can be seen on tvnz.co.nz at,

http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news

Panel Discussions Led By Paul Holmes
Response to HONE HARAWIRA interview

PAUL So what did the panel think of what Hone Harawira was speaking about. First of all let's talk about he insists that because Maori are first nation they have first nation rights and that means that they should have seats on the Super City. Here's what Hone Harawira said.

Hone Harawira: 'As the First Nation People of Aotearoa, as the tangata whenua, as the people who have been giving land for the settlement of Auckland for 200 years, there's an obligation on the Crown to recognise the right of Ngati Whatua, and Tainui, and all of the hapu and iwi around this area, representation on this Council.'

Alright Sandra Lee, comment on that, is he right?

SANDRA LEE – Former Local Government Minister
Yes he is right, I think that the Royal Commission could hardly be accused of being hikoiologists but they made it very clear in their findings that they thought that there should be tangata whenua representation at the table, and I would have thought that in a post Treaty settlement environment it would just be sad to have some of the people who own some of the most strategic assets in the region at the table and up front.

PAUL What do you think Tim?

TIM SHADBOLT – Invercargill Mayor
Well we've always had it, I mean this is why I – the debate is really only because we're looking at the Super City, but when I was on the Auckland Regional Authority back in the mid 80s we had Mrs Minhinnick I think from Waiuku, she was the representative and it did work well in a practical sort of sense, because a lot of the issues are Urupa and road building and how to mesh those in together, fishing rights, and one of the great achievements of the ARA, and Maori representation in there often supported environmental issues, we pushed the commercial fishermen out of Waitemata Harbour and that’s really given the people of Auckland a great fishing ground, and they were very supportive on those issues, it worked well there was no fuss, there was no debate and I think on the Regional Council later on they elected two Maori representatives.

THERESE ARSENEAU – Political Analyst
And let's be clear, the change from what the Royal Commission recommended to what the government is proposing at the moment, I think we would fully expect to have virtually no diversity around the table, and I mean diversity broadly and specifically in terms of Maori, and I say that because at the moment it looks like they're pushing First Past the Post, they have downsized the number of at large, and if we had STV and more at large members there'd be a greater chance of diversity, and then removing the specific Maori representation, and I agree with both my panellists here, let's step back and think from a very practical sense, it makes sense to have them there, it is a stronger system for it. The greatest danger facing local government at the moment is apathy, here we have a group of people who are gonna march and say we want – let us in – we want to be part of it, we don’t want to be left separate, we want to be part of it, that’s healthy.

PAUL Or have we moved beyond this, I mean have we got to the point where Maori have seen that they can elect their own party, this party can become very influential in government with the National Party as well, which is an extraordinary kind of thing, couldn’t Maori put together a ticket for the Super City.

SANDRA It's going to be very hard under the new proposition of the Super City for a number of diverse categories of New Zealand citizens and Aucklanders to get elected, it's going to be harder for less affluent people, it's going to be harder for women, it's going to be harder for Maori and in fact the Chinese people who were referred to earlier, for ethnic minorities it's also going to be harder simply by virtue of the sheer scale...

PAUL So should we put an Indian representative, in a Chinese representative, a Pacific Island representative in?

SANDRA Well that’s a spurious point.

PAUL Now why is this spurious?

SANDRA I'll tell you why it's spurious, it's analogous – forgive the animal analogy – but it's analogous to saying why in New Zealand are we putting all this money into saving Kiwi and we're not doing it for peacocks as well, of course we welcome new New Zealand citizens, but what distinguishes Maori in this country, and it should be well recognised by now 200 years on, is the fact that we are unique, endemic like the Kiwi, to this country, our language and culture can be found here and here only.

PAUL Let me just go to what Hone Harawira was saying about the banana box.

Hone Harawira: 'I have no issues whatsoever with Trevor Mallard feeling indigenous, that’s up to him, and congratulations to him, and if he's part and parcel of this culture such that he thinks that way that’s great, but there can only ever be one tangata whenua that’s Maori.'

So no matter how often generations of Pakeha are born in this country we can never be indigenous is that right?

TIM Well no, that’s a fairly intellectual debate, I think historians have been wrestling with that one and I think it's accepting, I think the cat in the banana box analogy was satirical and so was Trevor Mallard's action in saying right I'm going to be an indigenous person. I think it is just an historical thing, if the Chinese were here a thousand years before Europeans arrived...

PAUL Apparently they were in 1421 have you read the book?

TIM They might have been, well that'd be interesting wouldn’t it?

THERESE But Paul I think we're confusing two different types of representation, I mean when you talk about Chinese and having more women, you're talking about diversity around the table and I'm all for that, I think that’s best achieved though through using a proportional representation system. We're talking something very specific when we talk about Maori representation, and I think it's a poor reading of the Local Government Act if you don’t understand that it undertakes both those sorts of representation.

PAUL You aren’t suggesting that we have to learn about another proportional representation system before we vote for the ...

THERESE Well some people already are using it anyway.

PAUL Okay, I've got a question that’s come in from a viewer, I know the name of the viewer is David Rowe but ... why can't Maori be organising themselves into a ticket?

SANDRA Well I don’t think it's just an issue of organising, it's very hard for anybody to organise a ticket in Auckland and has been historically except to C&R over decades and decades and decades that had a minority, but I think we just have to think in the modern context, we are in a post Treaty settlement phase, most of the strategic assets have a strong impact or relationship with the tangata whenua of this region, it's not called Tamaki Makaurau for nothing, there are over a hundred iwi with a considerable interest in this region and to simply exclude them from the table is politically crazy.

PAUL So it can work. What you're saying it can work, it would be very useful from the point of view of liaising on things ...

THERESE Yeah but a ticket under First Past the Post, it still doesn’t work, all you have to do is look at the First Past the Post seats in the House and you'll see.

PAUL What are the politics of this Therese Arseneau, do you think, is Key going to have to give in on this? I mentioned this to him on Friday he seemed very bright and buoyant about it and said there'll be a solution.

TIM Yeah well he came to the Bluff Oyster Festival yesterday and I spent an hour with him and he was very relaxed about Maori representation so I don’t see it as locked in, this is just the next draft this proposal that’s on the table now.

THERESE And doesn't it make sense, I mean they’ve been so hard line so far about the Super City, what really matters I think to National is getting that unity, well of course I would expect at some stage politically it's very astute to make some concessions and clearly the Maori Party's relationship with National is important to them.

PAUL And is very good, it seems very good, interesting while they have they debates nothing seems to fundamentally threaten it.

SANDRA Well that’s the point, and look Key didn’t need the Maori Party numerically but the sky didn’t fall in when he got them at the table, what will be different for Auckland?

PAUL Very good panellists.

*****

Response to DAVID CUNLIFFE & SIR ROGER DOUGLAS interview

PAUL The main thing I took out of that interview with Sir Roger and David Cunliffe is that there is a road and there's a hill and a bus – a bus is going up. Here's what David Cunliffe said.

David Cunliffe: 'Well you know I think the analogy here is like a bus going up a hill, it's struggling with the gradient and what National's prepared to do is throw the passengers off, what we would do is drop a gear and power up the engine, and that’s the way to go.'

Now for the life of me I could not find a response to that. I was trying to think of clever lines, Tim Shadbolt what do you make of that?

TIM Well it was a bit blame game scene going on and there was a lot of ancient history being dragged up, I would have liked to have seen them look at the future a bit more, I mean we've got some big economic tsunamis coming our way, the leaky building syndrome in local government is going to hut us like a sledgehammer, us baby boomers are gonna hit the old age pension, boy that’s something all government is going to have to deal with, we've never been through a recession like this, no one's really quite sure, but I still take an optimistic line. At the turn of the century in 1901 we had 1.7 billion people in the world, now we've got 6 billion people in the world and one thing they’ve all got in common is they want to eat food, and New Zealand is essentially in terms of our4 economy a food producing nation.

PAUL Yeah but there's plenty of food production all round the world, you know millions of .

TIM Not as cheap as ours, that’s why the American's are trying to protect their farms.

PAUL Yes, changing the gear the bus going uphill changing the gear, I spose by dropping down a gear he means we've gotta increase the spending bit, increase the lubrication of the economy is that what he means?

SANDRA This will be an interesting budget because what the nuance between Key and Bill English sets will be telling for the future, but in terms of up a hill in third gear, Cullen was considered a tight wad, and he didn’t give the tax cuts, but in fact the international commentators are saying New Zealand's well positioned in what is the world's worst recession since 1930 because of it. So it's interesting that Roger Douglas hasn’t changed his tune a jot isn't it?

THERESE It's about speed too, I mean I think the analogy is about speed, how quickly you make the sorts of cuts that National's talking about, and you know Sir Roger's vision is that you would do it quite quickly and quite extensively. I mean, I remember hearing him speak once and his vision of how to deal with this is you start with a blank sheet, and you say what is it absolutely essential for government to do, so don’t tinker around the edges, go straight at departments, programmes, you know so big cuts, done quickly, versus I think what you know his analogy is you’ve gotta do it a bit slower than that.

PAUL Well that’s Sir Roger Douglas's way of doing things wasn’t it, but it's probably not Bill English's way, we're seeing a bit more for maternity, we're seeing a little bit for biofuel and so on, but are there gonna have to be cuts? Are there gonna have to be cuts given the climate of the times, given the present situation, and will that mean job losses?

SANDRA I don’t think that there have to be cuts, and that’s what I was saying, I think that Cullen's a bit of an unsung hero as a Finance Minister, because he didn’t give tax cuts he's left this country in very good shape and I think even John Key would acknowledge that, but I think that they're gonna have to be very prudent in terms of their spending, and also in terms of their bail outs, when you’ve got the United States talking about bailing out banks to the trillions of dollars, New Zealand doesn’t have that kind of luxury available to them, but having said that there is the proposition of actually cutting services to New Zealand citizens, Health and Education, is just not tenable. Look the last time the policies of Sir Roger were put in place, what we saw at the end of it was unprecedented youth poverty in this country, massive unemployment, unprecedented, we'd never seen asset sales, a loss of sovereignty, it just simply didn’t work.

THERESE` But with all due respect I do think that spending has gotten out of line with the income that’s coming in, and there is a gap there and something has to be done. So I think the budget needs to be judged not only on what they're gonna do in the short term, but the long term, because debt is an issue and if National's smart they’ll argue that issue in the correct way, which is do you in that future generations?

TIM Yes but they don’t tell us either way. Look what I'm seeing happening is there are two buses, one's going up the hill, and one's going down the hill, and it's a one way road, because we're constantly told we've gotta be prudent, we've gotta cut spending, and then we're told we've gotta stimulate the local economy, I mean we're getting ...

THERESE There's the median crises though and there's also the long term and it's very clear to me that the budget needs to address both those things, we need to increase productivity growth, that’s what going to grow ...

PAUL Either way I think the government assisted in its approach to the public by the general understanding that we're in something of a crisis and it may get a lot worse. Looking ahead to the week what do you expect, the House resumes this week, what would you be looking at this week Timothy?

TIM Well I'm still following the Bonny and Clyde story, it's so funny, I mean it's all about banks and how efficient they are in the modern age when we have bail outs, when they're not obviously very well organised, and then of course the question is what would you do if ten million ended up in your bank account.

PAUL Quickly what would you do, just quickly?

TIM No, I can run but I can't hide, I'd have to give the money back.

PAUL You'd go straight round to the bank. What would you do with ten million, looking at next week?

THERESE I mean the big story of course is the budget and to see what exactly National comes up with and what we saw today was a really good display of the sort of broader issues, and very much very different views on the proper role of government, this is the most political thing that will happen all year, I know it's about the economy, I know it's about finances, but in its very heart of hearts it is the vision statement for the government for the next year.

PAUL It is a very very big document that’s right and very confusing and it's probably hard to discuss it, that’s why we've got buses going up and down hills on a one way road. What are you looking for this week?

SANDRA With the banana box on board. Well it will be a test for Key because this is his first budget and this is a massive recession there's no getting away from that, but like Tim I tend to suspect that the ordinary member of the public's going to be more interested in whether Bonny and Clyde may ... it or whether ever.

PAUL If you got the ten million in your account would you take me with you?

SANDRA Oh Paul, in a flash.

PAUL Thank you very much panel.

ENDS

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