Sunday 13th June, 2010

The panel discussions have been transcribed below. The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can also be seen on tvnz.co.nz at, http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news

Q+A is repeated on TVNZ 7 at 9.10pm on Sunday nights and 10.10am and 2.10pm on Mondays.

Panel Discussions Led By Paul Holmes

In Response to GUYON ESPINER, MIKE WILLIAMS & MICHELLE BOAG

PAUL Both of those former Presidents made very good points Jon, Michelle made a particularly good point when she said you know if you're going out with only one credit card, say like the Mayor of Manukau City or Mita Ririnui, then you're going out with intent.

JON JOHANSSON – Political Analyst
Yeah that’s right and she reinforced that by saying that it goes directly to character, and you know the problem with this type of story for however many days it lasts is that all the prudent ministers are nonetheless dragged down. People just out in the public think goddamn politicians raking it every which way they can. But what we're actually seeing if your stepping back for this a wee bit is that right now this is the transitional costs, humiliating that they are for the individuals involved, of moving to a system of greater transparency.

PAUL And it's amazing that we haven't had that before.

JON Yeah indeed and you know that’s the trouble, is how long is the piece of strong if you kept on going backwards.

PAUL But there are some profligacies there aren't there, there's no doubt about that?

JON It does, and it does go to character because it just suggest that if you have that sense of entitlement and you know that projects itself in other ways as well, not just related to spending.

PAUL What do you think Margaret?

MARGARET MUTU – Iwi Leadership Group
Well at this stage of course the one who's getting the most attention is Shane. I'm just feeling very very sorry for his family at this time, for his wife and his children in particular, but Shane's Shane and Shane is the Labour Party's responsibility, he's their list MP, he doesn’t represent Maori in the North, he didn’t even stand in a Maori seat. So I hope he gets it sorted.

STEPHEN FRANKS – Former ACT MP
It's always hard to take it seriously in one sense that either he's someone who's working around the world with various governments, he said I can't think of a government I work with that wouldn’t pray to have a scandal as trivial as this. In the sense of the amounts, you know they're not millions into Swiss bank accounts, but it's the right thing to raise it because it is those small – what you do with small things is an indicator.

PAUL Yes true, as Michelle said, but the thing is of course is spose the reason there's such a hue and cry at the moment is we're a low wage economy at the best of times and these are very tough times, and these are people what $22000 trip around Europe, drinking what was the name of the cocktail, Mrs Anderton drinking a cocktail of $22 – Cosmopolitan.

STEPHEN Good on her, I think it's quite a cheap cocktail.

JON I think there's a cultural cringe element to this, which is that you know we all witnessed this enormous scandal over in Britain, and here we are down here replicating essentially the same sort of outrage, but I find it hard to feel continued outrage when actually all of this money was paid back, but the rules are clearly going to change – behaviour is certainly going to change.

PAUL Yeah but what does it tell us about the system inside there where time and again as Guyon was saying, time and again Ministerial Services writes to the ministers or their secretaries, Mike Williams made a very good point about other ministers seeing it, but nevertheless writes to the ministers secretaries saying, this is inarguable, there can be no private spending.

STEPHEN We're used to being bullied, Parliamentary Services, and Ministerial Services are used to being bullied.

JON It's a hard differential right.

STEPHEN Well it is and it happens in businesses too, if the CEO's not setting the right tone, not backing them up even when it seems trivial, then they lose their morale and they become cynical. I frankly was actually pleased at how active they had been because my experience of Parliamentary Services was that those of us who tried to play it by the rules felt that we were mugs in some senses, because of the ones that they weren’t chasing.

PAUL Were you aware that ministers could spend quite happily on the Ministerial Services credit card?

STEPHEN No we didn’t have credit cards, and I assumed they would though. It's quite an efficient way of keeping a record.

MARGARET I do think that there has been a lot made of this and I agree that if it was elsewhere in the world we'd be looking for something a little bit more substantive.

PAUL Well elsewhere the sums would be greater though because we're a smaller country.

JON But it is a point about attracting good people into parliament you know.

PAUL Yes, well good people is also good judgement people though isn't it.

STEPHEN But we're all flawed are we not?

PAUL Yes we're flawed.

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In Response to JIM BOLGER & MIKE MOORE

PAUL Welcome back to Q+A – Jon Johansson, Margaret Mutu, who's in the process actually of writing a constitution under the auspices of the Iwi Leadership Group, and Stephen Franks who was on Peter Dunne's Constitutional Arrangement Review Committee back in 2004. Now let's go back to what Jim Bolger said, he doesn’t want any constitution to be too restrictive I guess, he doesn’t want it to be superior law, and he wants to get moving.

Jim Bolger: 'We should accept New Zealand will have a written constitution. The question is that is it going to be superior law or not, I would argue for it not to be, are we going to move to have our own Head of State, I argue we will move to have our own Head of State, we should get on with both of those issues.'

PAUL But we should not rush things obviously. Jon Johansson.

JON Mike has steadfastly maintained you know the process, the how we go about the constitutional thing is the key to unlocking it, and I steadfastly agree with his view there because it's only – when you think about one of the biggest problems we have as a society is you know contemporary political discourse, how we actually discuss really tricky difficult problematic things, race being the premier example of that. It is only by providing a process which allows people you know imbued with the idea of mutual compromise and mutual respect, that you can actually answer these questions, rather than just...

STEPHEN We do what we've always done, which is work on simple practical questions when we have to, and one of them at the moment if you want to know what the biggest issue I think in the constitution at the moment is how do we make sure we've got a Supreme Court that isn't constantly accused of conflicts of interest. We're so small, we all know each other, it's a practical question, and it's a practical question you deal with by for example saying let's bring some people – let's get a right to parachute people in from Australia when we need independence?

JON Here's a practical question for you. How do you move from a bicultural fixation to our multicultural reality ...

STEPHEN You don’t get a whole bunch of busy bodies all earnestly discussing it, we simply recognise that most of us don’t think of that very much.

PAUL Well somebody who does think about it a lot of course is Margaret Mutu standing to your right Jon Johansson. How difficult is the Treaty issue going to be in any constitutional review?

MARGARET It's very clear the Treaty is the founding document of New Zealand as we know it now. You can't ignore it, it has to be there. But I want to come back Paul to what is a constitution, and it's really simple. It's the fundamental rules that you want to live by in this country. So what are the fundamental rules, the fundamental values that you have in this country? And I would argue that this country does have fundamental rules. A lot of it's about respecting each other, and a lot of it and has to be that you respect that Maori were here first, and we have real responsibilities with this country.

PAUL As Mike Moore says though, we are all boat people, and we happened to come, the Pakeha members of the community happened to come a few hundred years later, but we've been here a very long time, and we have nowhere else to go Margaret, which is the fundamental thing. Could you wear, could your group wear Pakeha being called indigenous?

MARGARET No, no Paul, we are all what we are, and I think Pakeha should be proud of being Pakeha in this country and Maori proud of being Maori in this country. We are who we are, and that’s something I'd like to see our constitution recognise, the reality, and stop thinking that we can take things off people because they're Maori, like the Foreshore and Seabed. It's these sorts of things that is why Maori have been discussing it for so long.

JON Actually our constitution order was dealing with that problem was it not?

MARGARET No it's not, and that’s why Maori have been working so hard for the past 15 years trying to get a written constitution in place.

PAUL Where's the review at at the moment, the promised coalition review?

MARGARET Right, now it was the Maori Party, knowing what Maoridom was working on in this, that got the agreement with National to start this debate. We're very very happy about that. Now the Iwi Leadership Forum met in Waitangi in February this year, we set up a constitutional group who is working on that right now. We have the book that was published on 6 February, that was launched on 6 February, on the constitution, so Maori have go their heads around this.

PAUL Yes and it's called Weeping Waters as we can see, so there's a sense of grievance there isn't there?

MARGARET And the need to get rid of the grievance, so that we can work together as a people, all of us.

PAUL Okay, but in terms of Maori whoever is doing the negotiating, when it went to the officials was it a happy meeting?

MARGARET No it wasn’t, because of this inherent feeling that somehow Pakeha are superior to Maori. We're never going to get ahead while that attitude remains.

PAUL It might not be that, it might be – I mean this is a panel I know and I'm doing and interview with you, but it might be more really that the majority let government simply could not sell the centrality of a Treaty in any constitution to the wider public.

MARGARET I don’t think that necessarily so. You’ve got some very good ministers in there who would be able to sell it. What you’ve got is a very entrenched public service that has difficulty with it.

STEPHEN The Treaty could easily go into a constitution without damage to anything. The Treaty is really simple, it says property rights limited government. What the problem is, that when you have constitution making, in the absence of an external threat, or something that forces people to focus on what they share, every group tries to get its hands on put a button on the lever of power, that puts something beyond the political debate, and so that the issue is, you could put the Treaty in but that’s not what people will argue for, they’ll be arguing for the so-called ... principles, they won't want the Treaty there the Treaty's far too straightforward.

PAUL On the matter what you're talking about this being a small country and you applied this to the Supreme Court and how we can get you know really honest judicial system for example, would you then move to an upper house, so that you had a check on the parliament.

STEPHEN It's just the old question of how do you appoint it, and it may be useful and I think that we could, but the big debate will be is it racially appointed, are we going to be a country that’s colour-blind law, or do we have an inherited racial privilege, cos Jim Bolger always used to say we should make half the members of the upper house Maori. Now that’s immediately divisive.

JON Just turning back to the constitutional review I think, and Margaret can correct me here I'm sure, but I suspect it's also very closely linked with the current negotiations about Foreshore and Seabed, and that it won't proceed until that is resolved.

MARGARET No no they were quite separate, they are quite separate, we've had separate discussions. But the constitutional debate is fundamental to the Foreshore and Seabed debate, it's fundamental to the Treaty settlements. It's fundamental to everything for Maori. Why we have to have it sorted.

JON When that review is announced we're going to understand what this government and the Maori Party view is of the path ahead. Now if that path is just completely exclusively bicultural in nature in terms of the process of the panel, they will be doing themselves and the rest of us a disservice, because 16% Pacifica and Asian Kiwis have to be at the table for this conversation, otherwise we're excluding them, and we don’t want a new out group.

PAUL I've got to leave it, can we look to what might be big in the news this coming week. Two words each.

STEPHEN Whether the Chinese can buy us up, because we keep spending more than we earn, next week the Vice President of China will be here with a trade delegation. Unless we decide to live within our means they will own us.

JON Foreshore and Seabed I think might even compete with the expenses scandal.

MARGARET I agree totally Foreshore and Seabed is going to take the front.

ENDS

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