Green MP Gareth Hughes’ response in Parliament to John’ Key’s opening speech for 2017. Hughes cleanly and definitively nails Key’s true contribution to New Zealand.
Some selected quotes have been reproduced here for your enjoyment. But seriously – watch the vid link.
Just outside of this debating chamber are the portraits of our great leaders.
From Seddon, to Savage and Fraser to Kirk how do these giants who established universal suffrage, a caring state in the midst of a depression and world war and a modern independent, bicultural New Zealand compare with you?
Is the flag it?
Your desperate, lumbering, grasping attempt at building a legacy with a flag won’t mask the realities.
Hungry kids up
Inequality up
Pollution up
Debt up
Housing costs up
Electricity costs up
Foreign ownership up
Corruption up
…
To the 300,000 kids growing up in poverty are you saying ‘Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for Serco, Sky City, Saudi Sheiks, Media works, Warners, and Rio Tinto?’
Under your leadership scientists have been ridiculed and silenced and NGOs have had their funding and voice cut.Rape crisis centres are closing and food banks are doing a brisk trade.
Kiwis are noted for their generosity and hospitality but Prime Minister, under you, New Zealand has become more welcoming to oil companies than refugees.
Whenever there is a Government scandal, extreme benefit measures are floated, and ‘look over there – pandas.’
…
But you seem like a good guy to have a beer with. No one else in this room could have got away with your stunts, gaffes and antics.
How have you gotten away with it? We could ask Crosby and Textor and point to the biggest of big business bucks and the dirtiest of dirty tricks operations in New Zealand history.
Kiwis are a good people, a caring people and we can reclaim our democracy from big money and dirty politics.
One of your legacies is what you cynically call the rent a crowd is growing into a real political movement for change.
Another legacy of your term is a Green Party stronger than ever before. Thank you Prime Minister.
Prime Minister as you reflect this may be one of your last opening speeches to Parliament I have no doubt you will go down in history as one of the most successful politicians of a generation. By ‘politician’ I mean the way it’s written on the Stuff comments section.
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