Trevor Mallard is pretty good at dishing it in the House. He's got one of the louder voices, which he uses to effect.
But yesterday he was on the receiving end; he asked the following Supplementary Question of the Prime Minister:
Hon Trevor Mallard: Further to his comment about Labour’s sales, does he accept that that occurred not this decade, not last decade, not the decade before that, but the decade before that; that as a result of that, the Hon Phil Goff, I, and the Hon Annette King all lost our seats; that Labour did not get back into power for 9 years; that we now understand—
The fun begins as Speaker Lockwood Smith terminates a lengthy question:
Trevor Mallard usually takes these kinds of affronts in good humour. But yesterday, he was decidedly touchy. That may account for him misleading the House in the supplementary. You see, the Lange/Palmer/Moore government was in power until the 1990 General election, which took place on 27 October 1990.
Asset sales continued through 1990, as you will see from this post. Among those assets sold by a Labour government during 1990 under the leadership of Sir Geoffrey Palmer and later Mike Moore, and woth David Caygill as Minister of Finance (Roger Douglas having by then resigned) were the Government Printing Office, The National Film Unit, the Tourist Hotel Corporation, Maui Synfuels, State Insurance Office, and of course the grand-daddy of all asset sales, Telecom Corporation.
Now we are sure that Trevor Mallard will read this post. And being an Honourable Member, when the House resumes at 2pm this afternoon he will take a point of order and seek the leave of the House to correct the statement he made yesterday in his Supplementary Question. We will be watching with interest!
And in the meantime, we can only thank Trevor Mallard for reminding us that he, Phil Goff and Annette King first entered Parliament "not this decade, not
last decade, not the decade before that, but the decade before that". John Key's comment about it being easier to sell assets than to get rid of Trevor Mallard has a ring of truth to it!
5 comments:
Wow, the Nats have got nothing have they? Forced to rely on petty nit-picking and failed privatisations over 20 years ago to justify the current round of mate enrichment and subversion of the public will. Classy.
You like this post then Judge? Wow, then you're REALLY going to like the one that goes up soon; and the one after that!!
It'll just be more shilling. I'll do them for you now if you like:
National good, Labour baaaaaaad.
There. Saved you some time.
Glad to see you're getting with the programme Drudge.
Shame you still want to rewrite history though. It appears to me most of the privatisations were a huge success. The government sold businesses they did not need to be involved with and paid down debt = success. Exactly as planned.
The major failure in the privatisations was when the fool Cullen renationalised his train set at a massively inflated price.
Paranormal
Well, they enriched Michael Fay and David Richwhite and allowed for essential infrastructure to be wound down and for consumers to be price-gouged and ended up costing taxpayers a fortune when the essential infrastructure needed to be bought back. On planet tory that's a win that should be replicated I guess.
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